Empirical evidence of asset price discontinuities or “jumps” in financial markets has been well documented in the literature. Recently, Aït-Sahalia and Jacod (2009b) defined a general “jump activity index” to describe the degree of jump activities for asset price semimartingales, and...

This paper presents a generalized pre-averaging approach for estimating the integrated volatility. This approach also provides consistent estimators of other powers of volatility in particular, it gives feasible ways to consistently estimate the asymptotic variance of the estimator of the...

Asset prices observed in financial markets combine equilibrium prices and market microstructure noise. In this paper, we study how to tell apart large shifts in equilibrium prices from noise using high frequency data. We propose a new nonparametric test which allows us to asymptotically remove...

Leverage effect has become an extensively studied phenomenon which describes the negative relation between the stock return and its volatility. Although this characteristic of stock returns is well acknowledged, most studies about it are based on cross-sectional calibration with parametric...

Classical statistics suggest that for inference purposes one should always use as much data as is available. We study how the presence of market microstructure noise in high-frequency financial data can change that result. We show that the optimal sampling frequency at which to estimate the...