spectral gmm estimation of continuous time processes abstract this paper derives a methodology for the estimation of continuous time stochastic models based on the characteristic function the estimation method does not require discretization of the stochastic process and it is simple to apply in practice the method is essentially generalized method of moments on the complex plane hence it shares the efficiency and distribution properties of gmm estimators we illustrate the method with some applications to relevant estimation problems in continuous time finance we estimate a model of stochastic volatility a jump diffusion model with constant volatility and a model that nests both the stochastic volatility model and the jump diffusion model we find that negative jumps are important to explain skewness and asymmetry in excess kurtosis of the stock return distribution while stochastic volatility is important to capture the overall level of this kurtosis positive jumps are not statistically significant once we allow for stochastic volatility in the model we also estimate a non affine model of stochastic volatility and find that the power of the diffusion coefficient appears to be between one and two rather than the value of one half that leads to the standard affine stochastic volatility model however we find that including jumps into this non affine stochastic volatility model reduces the power of the diffusion coefficient to one half finally we offer an explanation for the observation that the estimate of persistence in stochastic volatility increases dramatically as the frequency of the observed data falls based on a multiple factor stochastic volatility model

simulated moments estimation of markov models of asset prices this paper provides a simulated moments estimator sme of the parameters of dynamic models in which the state vector follows a time homogeneous markov process conditions are provided for both weak and strong consistency as well as asymptotic normality various tradeoffs among the regularity conditions underlying the large sample properties of the sme are discussed in the context of an asset pricing model this paper provides conditions for the consistency and asymptotic normality of a simulated moments estimator sme of the parameters of asset pricing models with time homogeneous markov representations of the stochastic forc ing process sme s for economic models have been proposed by mcfadden 1989 and pakes and pollard 1989 for i i d environments and by lee and ingram 1991 for a time series environment the sme for time series models examined in this paper is as follows the state vector yt that determines asset prices is assumed to follow a time homogeneous markov process whose transi tion function depends on an unknown parameter vector 3 0 asset prices and possibly other relevant data are observed as f yt 0 for some given function f of the underlying state and parameter vector in parallel a simulated state process y is generated analytically or numerically from the economic model and corresponding simulated observations f yj3 13 are taken for a given parameter choice f3 the parameter is chosen so as to match moments that is to minimize the distance between sample moments of the data f y 8030 and those of the simulated series f yt f3 in a sense to be made precise the proposed sme extends the generalized method of moments gmm estimator hansen 1982 to a large class of asset pricing models for which the moment restrictions of interest do not have analytic representations in terms of observable variables and the unknown parameter vector we provide conditions on the transition function of yt and the observation function f under which the sme of 030 is consistent and characterize the normalized asymptotic distribu tion of the estimator for two reasons neither the regularity conditions underly ing hansen s 1982 analysis of gmm estimators for time series models without

integration by parts and time reversal for diffusion processes in this paper we obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for the reversibility of the diffusion property assuming the existence of a density at every time t the proofs are based on techniques of the stochastic calculus of variations

orthogonal free quantum group factors are strongly 1 bounded abstract we prove that the orthogonal free quantum group factors l f o n are strongly 1 bounded in the sense of jung in particular they are not isomorphic to free group factors this result is obtained by establishing a spectral regularity result for the edge reversing operator on the quantum cayley tree associated to f o n and combining this result with a recent free entropy dimension rank theorem of jung and shlyakhtenko

causality effects in return volatility measures with random times we provide a structural approach to identify instantaneous causality effects between durations and stock price volatility so far in the literature instantaneous causality effects have either been excluded or cannot be identified separately from granger type causality effects by giving explicit moment conditions for observed returns over random duration intervals we are able to identify an instantaneous causality effect the documented causality effect has significant impact on inference for tick by tick data we find that instantaneous volatility forecasts for e g ibm stock returns must be decreased by as much as 40 when not having seen the next quote change before its conditionally median time also instantaneous volatilities are found to be much higher than indicated by standard volatility assessment procedures using tick by tick data for ibm a naive assessment of spot volatility based on observed returns between quote changes would only account for 60 of the actual volatility for less liquidly traded stocks at nyse this effect is even stronger

an analysis of hansen scheinkman moment estimators for discretely and randomly sampled diffusions we derive closed form expansions for the asymptotic distribution of hansen and scheinkman 1995 moment estimators for discretely and possibly randomly sampled diffusions this result makes it possible to select optimal moment conditions as well as to assess the efficiency of the resulting parameter estimators relative to likelihood based estimators or to an alternative type of moment conditions

autoregressive conditional duration a new model for irregularly spaced transaction data this paper proposes a new statistical model for the analysis of data which arrive at irregular intervals the model treats the time between events as a stochastic process and proposes a new class of point processes with dependent arrival rates the conditional intensity is developed and compared with other self exciting processes because the model focuses on the expected duration between events it is called the autoregressive conditional duration acd model asymptotic properties of the quasi maximum likelihood estimator are developed as a corollary to arch model results strong evidence is provided for duration clustering for the financial transaction data analyzed both deterministic time of day effects and stochastic effects are important the model is applied to the arrival times of trades and therefore is a model of transaction volume and also to the arrival of other events such as price changes models for the volatility of prices are estimated with price based durations and examined from a market microstructure point of view

closed form likelihood expansions for multivariate time inhomogeneous diffusions the aim of this paper is to find approximate log transition density functions for multivariate timeinhomogeneous diffusions in closed form there are many empirical evidences that the underlying data generating processes for many economic variables might change over time one possible way to explain the time dependent behavior of state variables is to model the drift or volatility terms as functions of time as well as state variables closed form likelihood expansions for multivariate time homogeneous diffusions have been obtained by ait sahalia 2008 this research is built on his work and extends his results to time inhomogeneous cases simulation study reveals that our method yields a very accurate approximate likelihood function that can be a good candidate when the true likelihood function is unavailable

nonparametric pricing of interest rate derivative securities we propose a nonparametric estimation procedure for continuous time stochastic models because prices of derivative securities depend crucially on the form of the instantaneous volatility of the underlying process we leave the volatility function unrestricted and estimate it nonparametrically only discrete data are used but the estimation procedure still does not rely on replacing the continuous time model by some discrete approximation instead the drift and volatility functions are forced to match the densities of the process we estimate the stochastic differential equation followed by the short term interest rate and compute nonparametric prices for bonds and bond options

closed form likelihood approximation and estimation of jump diffusions with an application to the realignment risk of the chinese yuan this paper provides closed form likelihood approximations for multivariate jump diffusion processes widely used in finance for a fixed order of approximation the maximum likelihood estimator mle computed from this approximate likelihood achieves the asymptotic efficiency of the true yet uncomputable mle as the sampling interval shrinks this method is used to uncover the realignment probability of the chinese yuan since february 2002 the market implied realignment intensity has increased fivefold the term structure of the forward realignment rate which completely characterizes future realignment probabilities is hump shaped and peaks at mid 2004 the realignment probability responds quickly to economic news releases and government interventions r 2007 elsevier b v all rights reserved

simulation estimation of time series models abstract a formal econometric treatment of the estimation of the parameters of a fully specified stochastic equilibrium model is proposed the method estimation by simulation yields an estimator which is shown to have an asymptotic normal distribution a goodness of fit test based on a chi square statistic is also derived

the law of the euler scheme for stochastic differential equations i convergence rate of the distribution function we study the approximation problem ofef x t byef x t n where x t is the solution of a stochastic differential equation x t n is defined by the euler discretization scheme with stept n andf is a given function for smoothf s talay and tubaro have shown that the erroref x t f x t n can be expanded in powers of 1 n which permits to construct romberg extrapolation precedures to accelerate the convergence rate here we prove that the expansion exists also whenf is only supposed measurable and bounded under an additional nondegeneracy condition of hormander type for the infinitesimal generator of x t to obtain this result we use the stochastic variations calculus in the second part of this work we will consider the density of the law ofx t n and compare it to the density of the law ofx t

a liapounov bound for solutions of the poisson equation in this paper we consider psi irreducible markov processes evolving in discrete or continuous time on a general state space we develop a liapounov function criterion that permits one to obtain explicit bounds on the solution to the poisson equation and in particular obtain conditions under which the solution is square integrable these results are applied to obtain sufficient conditions that guarantee the validity of a functional central limit theorem for the markov process as a second consequence of the bounds obtained a perturbation theory for markov processes is developed which gives conditions under which both the solution to the poisson equation and the invariant probability for the process are continuous functions of its transition kernel the techniques are illustrated with applications to queueing theory and autoregressive processes

estimating stochastic differential equations efficiently by minimum chi squared summary we propose a minimum chi squared estimator for the parameters of an ergodic system of stochastic differential equations with partially observed state we prove that the efficiency of the estimator approaches that of maximum likelihood as the number of moment functions entering the chi squared criterion increases and as the number of past observations entering each moment function increases the minimised criterion is asymptotically chi squared and can be used to test system adequacy when a fitted system is rejected inspecting studentised moments suggests how the fitted system might be modified to improve the fit the method and diagnostic tests are applied to daily observations on the u s dollar to deutschmark exchange rate from 1977 to 1992

the euler scheme for levy driven stochastic differential equations in relation with monte carlo methods to solve some integro differential equations we study the approximation problem of ee g x t by ee g bar x t n where x t 0 leq t leq t is the solution of a stochastic differential equation governed by a levy process z t bar x n t is defined by the euler discretization scheme with step fractn with appropriate assumptions we show that the error ee g x t ee g bar x t n can be expanded in powers of frac1n if the levy measure of z has finite moments of order high enough otherwise the rate of convergence is slower and its speed depends on the behavior of the tails of the levy measure the simulation of the increments of z t is also discussed

estimation of continuous time markov processes sampled at random time intervals we introduce a family of generalized method of moments estimators of the parameters of a continuous time markov process observed at random time intervals the results include strong consistency asymptotic normality and a characterization of standard errors sampling is at an arrival intensity that is allowed to depend on the underlying markov process and on the parameter vector to be estimated we focus on financial applications including tick based sampling allowing for jump diffusions regime switching diffusions and reflected diffusions

temporal aggregation of volatility models in this paper we consider temporal aggregation of volatility models we introduce semiparametric volatility models termed square root stochastic autoregressive volatility sr sarv which are characterized by autoregressive dynamics of the stochastic variance our class encompasses the usual garch models and various asymmetric garch models moreover our stochastic volatility models are characterized by multiperiod conditional moment restrictions in terms of observables the sr sarv class is a natural extension of the class of weak garch models this extension has four advantages i we do not assume that fourth moments are finite ii we allow for asymmetries skewness leverage effect that are excluded from weak garch models iii we derive conditional moment restrictions and iv our framework allows us to study temporal aggregation of igarch models

spectral methods for identifying scalar diffusions this paper shows how to identify nonparametrically scalar stationary diffusions from discrete time data the local evolution of the diffusion is characterized by a drift and diffusion coefficient along with the specification of boundary behavior we recover this local evolution from two objects that can be inferred directly from discrete time data the stationary density and a conveniently chosen eigenvalue eigenfunction pair of the conditional expectation operator over a unit interval of time this construction also lends itself to a spectral characterization of the over identifying restrictions implied by a scalar diffusion model of a discrete time markov process

point processes and queues martingale dynamics i martingales 1 histories and stopping times 2 martingales 3 predictability 4 square integrable martingales references solutions to exercises chapter i ii point processes queues and intensities 1 counting processes and queues 2 watanabe s characterization 3 stochastic intensity general case 4 predictable intensities 5 representation of queues 6 random changes of time 7 cryptographic point processes references solutions to exercises chapter ii iii integral representation of point process martingales 1 the structure of internal histories 2 regenerative form of the intensity 3 the representation theorem 4 hilbert space theory of poissonian martingales 5 useful extensions references solutions to exercises chapter iii iv filtering 1 the theory of innovations 2 state estimates for queues and markov chains 3 continuous states and nontrivial prehistory references solutions to exercises chapter iv v flows in markovian networks of queues 1 single station the historical results and the filtering method 2 jackson s networks 3 burke s output theorem for networks 4 cascades and loops in jackson s networks 5 independence and poissonian flows in markov chains references solutions to exercises chapter v vi likelihood ratios 1 radon nikodym derivatives and tests of hypotheses 2 changes of intensities a la girsanov 3 filtering by the method of the probability of reference 4 applications 5 the capacity of a point process channel 6 detection formula187 references189 solutions to exercises chapter vi vii optimal control 1 modeling intensity controls 2 dynamic programming for intensity controls complete observation case 3 input regulation a case study in impulsive control 4 attraction controls 5 existence via likelihood ratio references solutions to exercises chapter vii viii marked point processes 1 counting measure and intensity kernels 2 martingale representation and filtering 3 radon nikodym derivatives 4 towards a general theory of intensity references solutions to exercises chapter viii a1 background in probability and stochastic processes 1 introduction 2 monotone class theorem 3 random variables 4 expectations 5 conditioning and independence 6 convergence 7 stochastic processes 8 markov processes references a2 stopping times and point process histories 1 stopping times 2 changes of time and meyer dellacherie s integration formula 3 point process histories references a3 wiener driven dynamical systems 1 ito s stochastic integral 2 square integrable brownian martingales 3 girsanov s theorem references a4 stieltjes lebesgue calculus 1 the stieltjes lebesgue integral 2 the product and exponential formulas references general bibliography