Proponents of the existence of an optimum capital structure suggest that companies continue to employ debt until the marginal benefit of leverage equals its marginal cost. In contrast, advocates of the pecking order theory contend that observed capital structures reflect the relationship between...

The paper examines the relative performance of Stochastic Volatility (SV) and GARCH(1,1) models fitted to twenty plus years of daily data for three indices. As a benchmark, I use the realized volatility (RV) for the S&P 500, DOW JONES and STOXX50 indices, sampled at 5-minute intervals, taken...