In this paper we propose a test to determine whether jumps are present in a discretely sampled process or not. We use the concept of truncated power variation to construct our test statistics for (i) semimartingale models and (ii) semimartingale models with noise. The test statistics converge to...

In this paper a new method for monotone estimation of discount curves is proposed. The main idea of this approach is a simple modification of the commonly used (unconstrained) McCulloch Spline. We construct an integrated density estimate from the predicted values of the discount curve. It can be...

We propose a new set of formal backtests for VaR-forecasts that significantly improve upon existing backtesting procedures. Our new test of unconditional coverage can be used for both one-sided and two-sided testing, which leads to a significantly increased power. Second, we stress the...