Knowledge that Transforms

Journal Article Foundations for Financial Economics Get access Foundations for Financial Economics. Chi-fu Huang and Robert H. Litzenberger. New York: North Holland, 1988. 365 pp. ISBN 0-444-01310-5. Paul Pfleiderer Paul Pfleiderer Stanford University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Financial Studies, Volume 1, Issue 4, October 1988, Pages 447–449, https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/1.4.447 Published: 14 March 2015

This article investigates the existence of discontinuities in the sample path of exchange rates and of a stock market index. Maximum-likelihood estimation of a mixed jump-diffusion process reveals that exchange rates exhibit systematic discontuinities, even after allowing for conditional heteroskedasticity in the diffusion process. The results are much more significant in the foreign exchange market than in the stock market, which suggests differences in the structure of these markets. Finally, this jump component is shown to explain some of the empirically observed mispricings in the currency options market.

This study uses 90 years of daily data on the Dow Jones Industrial Average to test for the existence of persistent seasonal patterns in the rates of return. Methodological issues regarding seasonality tests are considered. We find evidence of persistently anomalous returns around the turn of the week, around the turn of the month, around the turn of the year, and around holidays.

This article develops a theory in which concentrated-trading patterns arise endogenously as a result of the strategic behavior of liquidity traders and informed traders. Our results provide a partial explanation for some of the recent empirical findings concerning the patterns of volume and price variability in intraday transaction data.

In this article we test the random walk hypothesis for weekly stock market returns by comparing variance estimators derived from data sampled at different frequencies. The random walk model is strongly rejected for the entire sample period (1962–1985) and for all subperiods for a variety of aggregate returns indexes and size-sorted portfolios. Although the rejections are due largely to the behavior of small stocks, they cannot be attributed completely to the effects of infrequent trading or time-varying volatilities. Moreover, the rejection of the random walk for weekly returns does not support a mean-reverting model of asset prices.