In estimating a firm's cost of equity with the CAPM the standard procedure is to proxy the market portfolio by a share index. Since this index is not the market portfolio this may give rise to a bias in estimating the firm's cost of equity. This paper investigates this bias and concludes that it...

Evolving volatility is a dominant feature observed in most financial time series and a key parameter used in option pricing and many other financial risk analyses. A number of methods for non-parametric scale estimation are reviewed and assessed with regard to the stylized features of financial...