In this paper I describe several methods of volatility estimation. First I focus on the classical parametric methods of variance estimation, such as the historical method, the implied volatility method and GARCH modeling. I also briefly review some stochastic volatility approaches. Then I...

Estimating the volatility from the underlying asset price history for the discrete observations case is a challenging inference problem. Yet it has attracted much research interest due to the key role of volatility in many areas of finance. In this paper we consider the Heston stochastic...

We propose and implement an empirical automatic bias correction (ABC) procedure for correcting the downward bias in the volatility estimators that utilize extreme value of asset prices. The bias originates from the random walk effect. The proposed estimator does not require knowledge of N, the...

The use of parametric GARCH models to characterise crude oil price volatility is widely observed in the empirical literature. In this paper, we consider an alternative approach involving nonparametric method to model and forecast oil price return volatility. Focusing on two crude oil markets,...

This study reconsiders the role of jumps for volatility forecasting by showing that jumps have a positive and mostly significant impact on future volatility. This result becomes apparent once volatility is separated into its continuous and discontinuous component using estimators which are not...

The objective of this paper is to introduce the break preserving local linear (BPLL) estimator for the estimation of unstable volatility functions. Breaks in the structure of the conditional mean and/or the volatility functions are common in Finance. Markov switching models (Hamilton, 1989) and...

This paper reviews basic notions of return variation in the context of a continuous-time arbitrage-free asset pricing model and discusses some of their applications. We first define return variation in the infeasible continuous-sampling case. Then we introduce realized measures obtained from...

In this paper, we derive a reflection principle for a random walk with the symmetric double exponential distribution. This allows us to come up with the closed form solution for the joint probability of the running maximum and the terminal value of the random walk. Based on this new theoretical...

We quantify the effects on contingent claim valuation of using an estimator for the unknown volatility σ of a geometric Brownian motion (GBM) process. The theme of the paper is to show what difficulties can arise when failing to account for estimation risk. Our narrative uses a direct estimator...

Thresholded Realized Power Variations (TPVs) are one of the most popular nonparametric estimators for general continuous-time processes with a wide range of applications. In spite of their popularity, a common drawback lies in the necessity of choosing a suitable threshold for the estimator, an...