By Andrew Bentley

Conventional measurements of equity return volatility rely on the asset’s previous day closing price to infer the current level of volatility and fail to incorporate information concerning intraday influntuctuations. Realized measures of volatility, such as the realized variance, are able to integrate intraday information by utilizing high-frequency data to form a very accurate measure of the asset’s return volatility. These measures can be used in parallel with the traditional definition of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) beta to better predict the time-varying systematic risk of an asset. In this analysis, realized measures were added to the General Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedastic (GARCH) framework to form a predictive model of beta that can quickly respond to rapid changes in the level of volatility. The ndings suggest that this predictive beta is better able to explain the stylized characteristics of beta and is a more accurate forecast of the realized beta than the GARCH model or the benchmark Autoregressive Moving-Average (ARMA) model used as a comparison.

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Advisor: George Tauchen | JEL Codes: C0, C3, C03, C32, C53, C58 | Tagged: Beta, GARCH, GARCHX, High-Frequency Data, Realized Varience