Asymptotic properties of the realized skewness and related statistics

Abstract

The recent empirical work of Amaya et al. (2015) has pointed out that the realized skewness, which is the sample skewness of intraday high-frequency returns of a financial asset, serves as forecasting future returns in the cross-section. Theoretically, the realized skewness is interpreted as the sample skewness of returns of a discretely observed semimartingale in a fixed interval. The aim of this paper is to investigate the asymptotic property of the realized skewness in such a framework. We also develop an estimation theory for the limiting characteristic of the realized skewness in a situation where measurement errors are present and sampling times are stochastic.