EXPONENTIAL REALIZED GARCH-ITO VOLATILITY MODELS

This paper introduces a novel Ito diffusion process to model high-frequency financial data that can accommodate low-frequency volatility dynamics by embedding the discrete-time nonlinear exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) structure with log-integrated volatility in a continuous instantaneous volatility process. The key feature of the proposed model is that, unlike existing GARCH-Ito models, the instantaneous volatility process has a nonlinear structure, which ensures that the log-integrated volatilities have the realized GARCH structure. We call this the exponential realized GARCH-Ito model. Given the autoregressive structure of the log-integrated volatility, we propose a quasi-likelihood estimation procedure for parameter estimation and establish its asymptotic properties. We conduct a simulation study to check the finite-sample performance of the proposed model and an empirical study with 50 assets among the S&P 500 compositions. Numerical studies show the advantages of the proposed model.