Based on a unique high-frequency dataset for more than fifty commodities, currencies, equity indices, and fixed income instruments spanning more than two decades, we document strong similarities in realized volatilities patterns across assets and asset classes. Exploiting these similarities within and across asset classes in panel-based estimation of new realized volatility models results in su...

This chapter reviews the major contributions over the last two decades to the literature on the Bayesian analysis of stochastic volatility (SV) models (univariate and multivariate). Bayesian inference is performed by tailoring Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) schemes that take into account the specific modeling characteristics. The popular univariate stochastic vo...

This paper is devoted to the application of B-splines to volatility modeling, specifically the calibration of the leverage function in stochastic local volatility models and the parameterization of an arbitrage-free implied volatility surface calibrated to sparse option data. We use an extension of classical B-splines obtained by including basis functions with infinite support. We first come ba...

Over the past few years, model complexity in quantitative finance has increased substantially in response to earlier approaches that did not capture critical features for risk management. However, given the preponderance of the classical Black–Scholes model, it is still not clear that this increased complexity is matched by additional accuracy in the ultimate result. In particular, the last dec...

We introduce a new framework, Realized GARCH, for the joint modeling of returns and realized measures of volatility. A key feature is a measurement equation that relates the realized measure to the conditional variance of returns. The measurement equation facilitates a simple modeling of the dependence between returns and future volatility. Realized GARCH models with a linear or log-linear spec...

We propose a class of alternative stochastic volatility models for electricity prices using the quantile function modeling approach. Specifically, we fit marginal distributions of power prices to two special classes of distributions by matching the quantile of an empirical distribution to that of a theoretical distribution. The distributions from the first class have closed-form formulas for pr...

In time series problems, noise can be divided into two categories: dynamic noise which drives the process, and observational noise which is added in the measurement process, but does not influence future values of the system. In this framework, we show that empirical volatilities (the squared relative returns of prices) exhibit a significant amount of observational noise. To model and predict t...

Stylized facts are uncovered for a domestic (U.S.) examination of the South African Rand futures contract (ZAR). In this preliminary study, we model complex volatility patterns by a nonparametric artificial neural network (ANN) that incorporates a performance enhancing closed-form regularization technique. The modeling characteristics revealed by the Kajiji-4 radial basis function (RBF) ANN pro...