It\^{o} processes are the most common form of continuous semimartingales, and include diffusion processes. This paper is concerned with the nonparametric regression relationship between two such It\^{o} processes. We are interested in the quadratic variation (integrated volatility) of the...

Empirical evidence of asset price discontinuities or “jumps” in financial markets has been well documented in the literature. Recently, Aït-Sahalia and Jacod (2009b) defined a general “jump activity index” to describe the degree of jump activities for asset price semimartingales, and...

The leverage effect has become an extensively studied phenomenon that describes the (usually) negative relation between stock returns and their volatility. Although this characteristic of stock returns is well acknowledged, most studies of the phenomenon are based on cross-sectional calibration...

This paper presents a generalized pre-averaging approach for estimating the integrated volatility, in the presence of noise. This approach also provides consistent estimators of other powers of volatility -- in particular, it gives feasible ways to consistently estimate the asymptotic variance...

We consider microstructure as an arbitrary contamination of the underlying latent securities price, through a Markov kernel $Q$. Special cases include additive error, rounding and combinations thereof. Our main result is that, subject to smoothness conditions, the two scales realized volatility...

We analyze the impact of time series dependence in market microstructure noise on the properties of estimators of the integrated volatility of an asset price based on data sampled at frequencies high enough for that noise to be a dominant consideration. We show that combining two time scales for...