Standard empirical investigations of jump dynamics in returns and volatility are fairly complicated due to the presence of latent continuous-time factors. We present a new discrete-time framework that combines heteroskedastic processes with rich specifications of jumps in returns and volatility....

Characterizing asset return dynamics using volatility models is an important part of empirical finance. The existing literature favors some rather complex volatility specifications whose relative performance is usually assessed through their likelihood based on a time-series of asset returns....

In this paper, we introduce a new approach for volatility modeling in discrete and continuous time. We follow the stochastic volatility literature by assuming that the variance is a function of a state variable. However, instead of assuming that the loading function is ad hoc (e.g., exponential...

In this paper, we consider testing marginal normal distributional assumptions. More precisely, we propose tests based on moment conditions implied by normality. These moment conditions are known as the Stein (1972) equations. They coincide with the first class of moment conditions derived by...

In this paper, we provide both qualitative and quantitative measures of the cost of measuring the integrated volatility by the realized volatility when the frequency of observation is fixed. We start by characterizing for a general diffusion the difference between the realized and the integrated...

This paper uses panel data and Euler equations to estimate preference specifications that are nonseparable in consumption and leisure. The econometric analysis uses panel data, and therefore it differs from existing econometric studies that use a representative agent framework. Moreover, the...

This paper investigates the importance of market incompleteness by comparing the rates of risk aversion estimated from complete and incomplete markets environments. For the incomplete-markets case, we use consumption data for 50 U.S. states. While the use of state-level data is conceptually...

Financial risk model evaluation or backtesting is a key part of the internal model's approach to market risk management as laid out by the Basle Commitee on Banking Supervision (1996). However, existing backtesting methods such as those developed in Christoffersen (1998), have relatively small...