CIRJE-F-515 "Estimating Stochastic Volatility Models Using Daily Returns and Realized Volatility Simultaneously"
Author Name Takahashi, Makoto, Yasuhiro Omori and Toshiaki Watanabe
Date September 2007
Full Paper PDF file
Remarks Revised in March 2008.
Abstract

Realized volatility, which is the sum of squared intraday returns over a certain interval such as a day, has recently attracted the attention of financial economists and econometricians as an accurate measure of the true volatility. In the real market, however, the presence of non-trading hours and market microstructure noise in transaction prices may cause the bias in the realized volatility. On the other hand, daily returns are less subject to the noise and therefore may provide additional information on the true volatility. From this point of view, modeling realized volatility and daily returns simultaneously based on well-known stochastic volatility model is proposed. Empirical studies using intraday data of Tokyo stock price index show that this model can estimate realized volatility biases and parameters simultaneously. Bayesian approach is taken and an efficient sampling algorithm is proposed to implement the Markov chain Monte Carlo method for our simultaneous model. The result of the model comparison between the simultaneous models using both naive and scaled realized volatilities indicates that the effect of non-trading hours is more essential than that of microstructure noise and that asymmetry is crucial in stochastic volatility models. Our Bayesian approach provides an estimate of the entire conditional predictive distribution of returns under consideration of the uncertainty in estimation of both biases and parameters. Hence common risk measures, such as value-at-risk and expected shortfall, can be easily estimated.