文档介绍:Financial The Distribution of Stock Return
Volatility
Institutions
Center
by
Torben G. Andersen, Tim Bollerslev, Francis
X. Diebold and Heiko Ebens
00-27
The Wharton Financial Institutions Center
The Wharton Financial Institutions Center provides a multi-disciplinary research approach to
the problems and opportunities facing the financial services industry in its search petitive
excellence. The Center's research focuses on the issues related to managing risk at the firm level
as well as ways to improve productivity and performance.
The Center fosters the development of munity of faculty, visiting scholars and .
candidates whose research plement and support the mission of the Center. The
Center works closely with industry executives and practitioners to ensure that its research is
informed by the operating realities petitive demands facing industry participants as they
petitive excellence.
Copies of the working papers summarized here are available from the Center. If you would like
to learn more about the Center or e a member of our munity, please let us
know of your interest.
Anthony M. Santomero
Director
The Working Paper Series is made possible by a generous
grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
The Distribution of Stock Return Volatility*
Torben G. Andersena, Tim Bollerslevb, Francis X. Dieboldc and Heiko Ebensd
December 21, 1999
Abstract
We exploit direct model-free measures of daily equity return volatility and correlation obtained
from high-frequency intraday transaction prices on individual stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial
Average over a five-year period to confirm, solidify and extend existing characterizations of stock
return volatility and correlation We find that the unconditional distributions of the variances and
covariances for all thirty stocks are leptokurtic and highly skewed to the right, while the
logarithmic standard deviations and correlations all appear approximately Gaussian. Moreover,
t