We develop estimators and asymptotic theory to decompose the quadratic covariation between two assets into its continuous and jump components, in a manner that is robust to the presence of market microstructure noise. Using high frequency data on different assets classes, we find that the recent...

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...

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....

The paper reviews the theoretical foundations of the use of forward interest rates to infer expected future rates of interest, inflation, currency depreciation and inflation differentials. Forward rates are related to these expected future variables via combinations of term, inflation and...

This paper studies the predictability of ultra high-frequency stock returns and durations to relevant price, volume and transactions events, using machine learning methods. We find that, contrary to low frequency and long horizon returns, where predictability is rare and inconsistent,...

This paper examines the leverage effect, or the generally negative covariation between asset returns and their changes in volatility, under a general setup that allows the log-price and volatility processes to be Ito semimartingales. We decompose the leverage effect into continuous and...

We consider the problem of optimal investment and consumption in a class of multidimensional jump-diffusion models in which asset prices are subject to mutually exciting jump processes. This captures a type of contagion where each downward jump in an asset's price results in increased likelihood...

High-frequency financial data are not only discretely sampled in time but the time separating successive observations is often random. We analyze the consequences of this dual feature of the data when estimating a continuous-time model. In particular, we measure the additional effects of the...