We propose a unified framework for estimating integrated variances and covariances based on simple OLS regressions allowing for a general market microstructure noise specification. We show that our estimators can outperform in terms of the root mean squared error criterion the most recent and...

This paper studies the theoretical properties and implementation issues with the risk-neutral density (RND) estimator based on the mixture-of-lognormal (MLN) approach. First, we establish the consistency and asymptotic normality of the MLN method under the correct choice of mixtures and propose...

We propose a new approach to examine sell-side analysts' career concerns by relating their forecast boldness to their employers' news flows. Specifically, we use banking sector news to proxy for the severity of career concerns. Analysts follow more closely the consensus forecast when the...

In this paper we provide evidence that the trading activity of small retail investors carries significant genuine information for the short term out-of-sample forecasting of foreign exchange rates. Our findings are based on a unique dataset of around 2000 retail investors from the OANDA FXTrade...