Jumps and diffusive changes in stock prices are different ways in which information is reflected in the prices. We use nonparametric methods to decompose returns on individual stocks into jumps and diffusive components. Contrary to the conventional assumption that jump intensity is positively...

The increase in trading frequency of Exchanged Traded Funds (ETFs) presents a positive externality for financial risk management when the price of the ETF is available at a higher frequency than the price of the component stocks. The positive spillover consists in improving the accuracy of...

In this paper, we develop a penalized realized variance (PRV) estimator of the quadratic variation (QV) of a high-dimensional continuous Itô semimartingale. We adapt the principle idea of regularization from linear regression to covariance estimation in a continuous-time high-frequency setting....

Variance decompositions of the Mexico-United States real exchange rate are examined using monthly data on consumer prices and the nominal exchange rate for the period January, 1969 to February, 2000. The results show that the robust result found in industrial-country data that most of the...

This paper analyzes immunization strategies in the mean-variance framework. We characterize the efficient portfolio allocations and identify the minimum variance immunization strategy. We show that the efficient allocations can be superior or inferior to the minimum variance allocation as time...

This paper examines the efficiency of standard variance reduction techniques across option characteristics when pricing American-style call and put options with the Least-Squares Monte Carlo algorithm of Longstaff & Schwartz (2001). Our numerical experiments evaluate the efficiency of antithetic...

The covariance between US Treasury bond returns and stock returns has moved considerably over time. While it was slightly positive on average in the period 1953--2009, it was unusually high in the early 1980''s and negative in the 2000''s, particularly in the downturns of 2000--02 and 2007--09....

In the presence of asset returns’ non-normal behavior, optimal portfolio selection techniques should consider higher-moment risks. In this paper, we extend the Black-Litterman (BL) asset allocation model (Black & Litterman, 1990) by applying the hidden truncation skew-normal distribution...