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We develop a statistical inference procedure for the ubiquitous calendar effects in microstructure noise using high frequency data. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first inference theory ever built for noise calendar effect under the general semi‐martingale‐plus‐noise setup for prices contaminated with non‐stationary, endogenous, and serially dependent microstructure noise. We devise a noise‐calendar‐effect estimator by an appropriately scaled average of high‐frequency returns that precede a time of day across a large number of trading days. Feasible central limit theorem for the estimator is established under a joint infill and long‐span asymptotics. Monte Carlo simulations corroborate our theoretical findings. An empirical study on the high‐frequency data of the e‐mini S&P 500 futures and a Chinese stock demonstrates that the noise calendar effect has undergone significant changes over time for the latter, yet remains stable for the former. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a standard continuous time asset pricing model, this paper provides an explosion time characterization of asset price bubbles that extends the existing characterization theorems in the literature from diffusion processes to general semimartingales (which can include jumps). This characterization has a nice economic interpretation, not emphasized in the existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose using a permutation test to detect discontinuities in an underlying economic model at a known cutoff point. Relative to the existing literature, we show that this test is well suited for event studies based on time‐series data. The test statistic measures the distance between the empirical distribution functions of observed data in two local subsamples on the two sides of the cutoff. Critical values are computed via a standard permutation algorithm. Under a high‐level condition that the observed data can be coupled by a collection of conditionally independent variables, we establish the asymptotic validity of the permutation test, allowing the sizes of the local subsamples to be either be fixed or grow to infinity. In the latter case, we also establish that the permutation test is consistent. We demonstrate that our high‐level condition can be verified in a broad range of problems in the infill asymptotic time‐series setting, which justifies using the permutation test to detect jumps in economic variables such as volatility, trading activity, and liquidity. These potential applications are illustrated in an empirical case study for selected FOMC announcements during the ongoing COVID‐19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tests volatility jumps based on the high frequency data. Under the null hypothesis that the volatility process is a continuous semimartingale, our test statistic converges to a normal distribution, and under the alternative hypothesis where the volatility has jumps, the statistic diverges to infinity. Compared to the test statistic of Bibinger et al. (Bibinger et al. (2017). Annals of Statistics 45, 1542–1578), our proposed statistic diverges to infinity at a faster rate, and has a better power. Simulation studies confirm the theoretical results, and an empirical analysis shows that some real financial data possess volatility jumps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce the Realized moMents of Disjoint Increments (ReMeDI) paradigm to measure microstructure noise (the deviation of the observed asset prices from the fundamental values caused by market imperfections). We propose consistent estimators of arbitrary moments of the microstructure noise process based on high-frequency data, where the noise process could be serially dependent, endogenous, and nonstationary. We characterize the limit distributions of the proposed estimators and construct confidence intervals under infill asymptotics. Our simulation and empirical studies show that the ReMeDI approach is very effective to measure the scale and the serial dependence of microstructure noise. Moreover, the estimators are quite robust to model specifications, sample sizes, and data frequencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a new theory for the conduct of nonparametric inference about the latent spot volatility of a semimartingale asset price process. In contrast to existing theories based on the asymptotic notion of an increasing number of observations in local estimation blocks, our theory treats the estimation block size k as fixed. While the resulting spot volatility estimator is no longer consistent, the new theory permits the construction of asymptotically valid and easy‐to‐calculate pointwise confidence intervals for the volatility at any given point in time. Extending the theory to a high‐dimensional inference setting with a growing number of estimation blocks further permits the construction of uniform confidence bands for the volatility path. An empirically realistically calibrated simulation study underscores the practical reliability of the new inference procedures. An empirical application based on intraday data for the S&P 500 equity index reveals highly significant abrupt changes, or jumps, in the market volatility at FOMC news announcement times, validating recent uses of various high‐frequency‐based identification schemes in asset pricing finance and monetary economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop tests for deciding whether a large cross‐section of asset prices obey an exact factor structure at the times of factor jumps. Such jump dependence is implied by standard linear factor models. Our inference is based on a panel of asset returns with asymptotically increasing cross‐sectional dimension and sampling frequency, and essentially no restriction on the relative magnitude of these two dimensions of the panel. The test is formed from the high‐frequency returns at the times when the risk factors are detected to have a jump. The test statistic is a cross‐sectional average of a measure of discrepancy in the estimated jump factor loadings of the assets at consecutive jump times. Under the null hypothesis, the discrepancy in the factor loadings is due to a measurement error, which shrinks with the increase of the sampling frequency, while under an alternative of a noisy jump factor model this discrepancy contains also nonvanishing firm‐specific shocks. The limit behavior of the test under the null hypothesis is nonstandard and reflects the strong‐dependence in the cross‐section of returns as well as their heteroskedasticity which is left unspecified. We further develop estimators for assessing the magnitude of firm‐specific risk in asset prices at the factor jump events. Empirical application to S&P 100 stocks provides evidence for exact one‐factor structure at times of big market‐wide jump events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop econometric tools for studying jump dependence of two processes from high-frequency observations on a fixed time interval. In this context, only segments of data around a few outlying observations are informative for the inference. We derive an asymptotically valid test for stability of a linear jump relation over regions of the jump size domain. The test has power against general forms of nonlinearity in the jump dependence as well as temporal instabilities. We further propose an efficient estimator for the linear jump regression model that is formed by optimally weighting the detected jumps with weights based on the diffusive volatility around the jump times. We derive the asymptotic limit of the estimator, a semiparametric lower efficiency bound for the linear jump regression, and show that our estimator attains the latter. The analysis covers both deterministic and random jump arrivals. In an empirical application, we use the developed inference techniques to test the temporal stability of market jump betas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The availability of high frequency financial data has generated a series of estimators based on intra-day data, improving the quality of large areas of financial econometrics. However, estimating the standard error of these estimators is often challenging. The root of the problem is that traditionally, standard errors rely on estimating a theoretically derived asymptotic variance, and often this asymptotic variance involves substantially more complex quantities than the original parameter to be estimated. Standard errors are important: they are used to assess the precision of estimators in the form of confidence intervals, to create 'feasible statistics' for testing, to build forecasting models based on, say, daily estimates, and also to optimize the tuning parameters. The contribution of this paper is to provide an alternative and general solution to this problem, which we call Observed Asymptotic Variance. It is a general nonparametric method for assessing asymptotic variance (AVAR). It provides consistent estimators of AVAR for a broad class of integrated parameters Θ = ∫ θ t d t, where the spot parameter process θ can be a general semimartingale, with continuous and jump components. The observed AVAR is implemented with the help of a two-scales method. Its construction works well in the presence of microstructure noise, and when the observation times are irregular or asynchronous in the multivariate case. The methodology is valid for a wide variety of estimators, including the standard ones for variance and covariance, and also for more complex estimators, such as, of leverage effects, high frequency betas, and semivariance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a semiparametric two-step inference procedure for a finite-dimensional parameter based on moment conditions constructed from high-frequency data. The population moment conditions take the form of temporally integrated functionals of state-variable processes that include the latent stochastic volatility process of an asset. In the first step, we nonparametrically recover the volatility path from high-frequency asset returns. The nonparametric volatility estimator is then used to form sample moment functions in the second-step GMM estimation, which requires the correction of a high-order nonlinearity bias from the first step. We show that the proposed estimator is consistent and asymptotically mixed Gaussian and propose a consistent estimator for the conditional asymptotic variance. We also construct a Bierens-type consistent specification test. These infill asymptotic results are based on a novel empirical-process-type theory for general integrated functionals of noisy semimartingale processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider two semimartingales sampled at stopping times in an asynchronous manner. We are interested in estimating their cumulative co-volatility separately from the sum of their co-jumps. For this purpose, we combine the Hayashi-Yoshida method (to deal with the asynchronicity) with the threshold technique (to separate the jumps) and consider a class of statistics called the truncated Hayashi-Yoshida estimator. We prove the consistency and the asymptotic mixed normality of the truncated Hayashi-Yoshida estimator under some mild conditions allowing the presence of infinite activity jumps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop an asymptotic theory for the pre-averaging estimator when asset price jumps are weakly identified, here modeled as local to zero. The theory unifies the conventional asymptotic theory for continuous and discontinuous semimartingales as two polar cases with a continuum of local asymptotics, and explains the breakdown of the conventional procedures under weak identification. We propose simple bias-corrected estimators for jump power variations, and construct robust confidence sets with valid asymptotic size in a uniform sense. The method is also robust to certain forms of microstructure noise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

. In this study we are concerned with inference on the correlation parameter ρ of two Brownian motions, when only high-frequency observations from two one-dimensional continuous Itô semimartingales, driven by these particular Brownian motions, are available. Estimators for ρ are constructed in two situations: either when both components are observed (at the same time), or when only one component is observed and the other one represents its volatility process and thus has to be estimated from the data as well. In the first case it is shown that our estimator has the same asymptotic behaviour as the standard one for i.i.d. normal observations, whereas a feasible estimator can still be defined in the second framework, but with a slower rate of convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a short survey on limit theorems for certain functionals of semimartingales that are observed at high frequency. Our aim is to explain the main ideas of the theory to a broader audience. We introduce the concept of stable convergence, which is crucial for our purpose. We show some laws of large numbers (for the continuous and the discontinuous case) that are the most interesting from a practical point of view, and demonstrate the associated stable central limit theorems. Moreover, we state a simple sketch of the proofs and give some examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the framework of stochastic volatility models we examine estimators for the integrated volatility based on the pth power variation (i.e. the sum of pth absolute powers of the log-returns). We derive consistency and distributional results for the estimators given high-frequency data, especially taking into account what kind of process we may add to our model without affecting the estimate of the integrated volatility. This may on the one hand be interpreted as a possible flexibility in modelling, for example adding jumps or even leaving the framework of semimartingales by adding a fractional Brownian motion, or on the other hand as robustness against model misspecification. We will discuss possible choices of p under different model assumptions and irregularly spaced data. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]