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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.

In this paper, we develop econometric tools to analyze the integrated volatility of the efficient price and the dynamic properties of microstructure noise in high-frequency data under general dependent noise. We first develop consistent estimators of the variance and autocovariances of noise using a variant of realized volatility. Next, we employ these estimators to adapt the pre-averaging method and derive a consistent estimator of the integrated volatility, which converges stably to a mixed Gaussian distribution at the optimal rate $n^{1/4}$. To refine the finite sample performance, we propose a two-step approach that corrects the finite sample bias, which turns out to be crucial in applications. Our extensive simulation studies demonstrate the excellent performance of our two-step estimators. In an empirical study, we characterize the dependence structures of microstructure noise in several popular sampling schemes and provide intuitive economic interpretations; we also illustrate the importance of accounting for both the serial dependence in noise and the finite sample bias when estimating integrated volatility.

This note contains the supplements to Li and Linton (2019). Section A contains extensive simulation studies. Section B presents the methodology and a detailed numerical algorithm to select the tuning parameters. Section C presents additional empirical studies. Section D contains all mathematical proofs.