The standard heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) model is perhaps the most popular benchmark model for forecasting return volatility. It is often estimated using raw realized variance (RV) and ordinary least squares (OLS). However, given the stylized facts of RV and well-known properties of OLS,...

The Heterogeneous Autoregressive (HAR) model of Corsi (2009) has become the benchmark model for predicting realized volatility given its simplicity and consistent empirical performance. Many modifications and extensions to the original model have been proposed that often only provide incremental...

This paper proposes two new approaches to improve estimation of the coefficients of the multivariate HAR (MHAR) model, and in turn improve forecast performance. A robust estimator of the covariance matrix is adopted to replace the realized covariance (RCov) matrix while estimating the MHAR...