Asset returns have traditionally been modeled in the literature as following continuous-time Markov processes, and in many cases diffusions. Can discretely sampled financial rate data help us decide which continuous-time models are sensible? Diffusion processes are characterized by the...

Frequently, economic theory places shape restrictions on functional relationships between economic variables. This paper develops a method to constrain the values of the first and second derivatives of nonparametric locally polynomial estimators. We apply this technique to estimate the state...

Implicit in the prices of traded financial assets are Arrow- Debreu state prices or, in the continuous-state case, the state-price density (SPD). We construct an estimator for the SPD implicit in option prices and derive an asymptotic sampling theory for this estimator to gauge its accuracy. The...