Estimating the GARCH Diffusion: Simulated Maximum Likelihood in Continuous Time

A new algorithm is developed to provide a simulated maximum likelihood estimation of the GARCH diffusion model of Nelson (1990) based on return data only. The method combines two accurate approximation procedures, namely, the polynomial expansion of Ait-Sahalia (2008) to approximate the transition p...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: KLEPPE, Tore Selland, YU, Jun, SKAUG, Hans J.
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2010
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/1232
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soe_research/article/2231/viewcontent/sml_garchdiffusion01.pdf
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:A new algorithm is developed to provide a simulated maximum likelihood estimation of the GARCH diffusion model of Nelson (1990) based on return data only. The method combines two accurate approximation procedures, namely, the polynomial expansion of Ait-Sahalia (2008) to approximate the transition probability density of return and volatility, and the Efficient Importance Sampler (EIS) of Richard and Zhang (2007) to integrate out the volatility. The first and second order terms in the polynomial expansion are used to generate a base-line importance density for an EIS algorithm. The higher order terms are included when evaluating the importance weights. Monte Carlo experiments show that the new method works well and the discretization error is well controlled by the polynomial expansion. In the empirical application, we fit the GARCH diffusion to equity data, perform diagnostics on the model fit, and test the finiteness of the importance weights.