In this study we provide an analytical characterization of the impact of zero returns on the popular realized covariance estimator of Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard (2004). In our framework, efficient price processes evolve as a semimartingale with some likelihood of repeated prices. We show...

The estimation of the covariances of high-frequency asset prices is problematic because of asynchronous trading and market microstructure noise. In the last years, both parametric and non-parametric methods have been proposed in order to handle these effects. Little attention has instead been...

We present a theory of homogeneous volatility bridge estimators for log-price stochastic processes. The main tool of our theory is the parsimonious encoding of the information contained in the open, high and low prices of incomplete bridge, corresponding to given log-price stochastic process,...