A rapidly growing literature has documented important improvements in volatility measurement and forecasting performance through the use of realized volatilities constructed from high-frequency returns coupled with relatively simple reduced-form time series modeling procedures. Building on...

This paper explores the quadratic variation (QV) as an alternative measure to the bid-ask spread in limit order markets when observed at high resolution. Although the spread cannot be precisely estimated because of microstructure noise, the QV of the price series, consisting of the transaction...