Asset returns have traditionally been modeled in the literature as following continuous-time Markov processes, and in many cases diffusions. Can discretely sampled financial rate data help us decide which continuous-time models are sensible? Diffusion processes are characterized by the...

When a continuous-time diffusion is observed only at discrete dates, not necessarily close together, the likelihood function of the observations is in most cases not explicitly computable. Researchers have relied on simulations of sample paths in between the observations points, or numerical...

This paper develops and estimates a continuous-time model of a financial market where investors' trading strategies and the specialist's rule of price adjustments are the best response to each other. We examine how far modeling market microstructure in a purely rational framework can go in...

Different continuous-time models for interest rates coexist in the literature. We test parametric models by comparing their implied parametric density to the same density estimated nonparametrically. We do not replace the continuous-time model by discrete approximations, even though the data are...

We propose a nonparametric estimation procedure for continuous- time stochastic models. Because prices of derivative securities depend crucially on the form of the instantaneous volatility of the underlying process, we leave the volatility function unrestricted and estimate it nonparametrically....

Realistic models for financial asset prices used in portfolio choice, option pricing or risk management include both a continuous Brownian and a jump components. This paper studies our ability to distinguish one from the other. I find that, surprisingly, it is possible to perfectly disentangle...

This paper provides closed-form expansions for the transition density and likelihood function of arbitrary multivariate diffusions. The expansions are based on a Hermite series, whose coefficients are calculated explicitly by exploiting the special structure afforded by the diffusion hypothesis....

It is a common practice in finance to estimate volatility from the sum of frequently-sampled squared returns. However market microstructure poses challenges to this estimation approach, as evidenced by recent empirical studies in finance. This work attempts to lay out theoretical grounds that...

This paper develops and estimates a continuous-time model of a financial market where investors' trading strategies and the specialist's rule of price adjustments are the best response to each other. We examine how far modeling market microstructure in a purely rational framework can go in...

We propose an empirical implementation of the consumption-investment problem using the martingale representation alternative to dynamic programming. Our method is based on the direct observation of state prices from options data. This greatly simplifies the investor's task of specifying the...