Realistic models for financial asset prices used in portfolio choice, option pricing or risk management include both a continuous Brownian and a jump components. This paper studies our ability to distinguish one from the other. I find that, surprisingly, it is possible to perfectly disentangle...

We develop and implement a new method for maximum likelihood estimation in closed-form of stochastic volatility models. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we compare a full likelihood procedure, where an option price is inverted into the unobservable volatility state, to an approximate likelihood...

High-frequency financial data are not only discretely sampled in time but the time separating successive observations is often random. We analyze the consequences of this dual feature of the data when estimating a continuous-time model. In particular, we measure the additional effects of the...