We develop a stochastic volatility option pricing model that exploits the informative content of historical high frequency data. Using the Two Scales Realized Volatility as a proxy for the unobservable returns volatility, we propose a simple (affine) but effective long-memory process: the Heterogeneous Auto-Regressive Gamma (HARG) model. This discrete–time process, combined with an exponential ...

Recorded prices are known to diverge from their “efficient” values due to the presence of market microstructure contaminations. The microstructure noise creates a dichotomy in the model-free estimation of integrated volatility. While it is theoretically necessary to sum squared returns that are computed over very small intervals to better indentify the underlying volatility over a period, the s...

I propose a bond-specific, time-varying friction measure of round-trip liquidity costs. The measure is robust to outliers in daily bond returns and accounts for the idiosyncratic information behind bond trading decisions. Using transactions from January 2004 to December 2010, I find that liquidity costs display a strong correlation with credit conditions and peaked during the sub-prime crisis. ...

This paper constructs estimates of daily stock index volatilities and correlation using high-frequency (one-minute) intraday stock indices. The key feature of these ‘realized’ volatilities and correlations is that they are not only model-free but also approximately measurement-error-free. In fact, they can be treated as observed rather than latent, so that direct modeling and forecasting of the...

The Hansen-Lunde (HL) research program is generally first-rate, displaying a rare blend of theoretical prowess and applied sense. The present paper is no exception. In a major theoretical advance, HL allow for correlation between microstructure (MS) noise and latent price. (I prefer “latent price” to terms such as “efficient price” or “true price,” which carry lots of excess baggage.) In a para...

Several methods have recently been proposed in the ultra high frequency financial literature to remove the effects of microstructure noise and to obtain consistent estimates of the integrated volatility (IV) as a measure of ex-post daily volatility. Even bias-corrected and consistent (modified) realized volatility (RV) estimates of the integrated volatility can contain residual microstructure n...

A well developed literature exists in relation to modeling and forecasting asset return volatility. Much of this relate to the development of time series models of volatility. This paper proposes an alternative method for forecasting volatility that does not involve such a model. Under this approach a forecast is a weighted average of historical volatility. The greatest weight is given to perio...