Estimation of α-Stable Sub-Gaussian Distributions for Asset Returns Sebastian Kring, Svetlozar T. Rachev, Markus Hochst¨ otter¨ , Frank J. Fabozzi Sebastian Kring Institute of Econometrics, Statistics and Mathematical Finance School of Economics and Business Engineering University of Karlsruhe Postfach 6980, 76128, Karlsruhe, Germany E-mail:
[email protected] Svetlozar T. Rachev Chair-Professor, Chair of Econometrics, Statistics and Mathematical Finance School of Economics and Business Engineering University of Karlsruhe Postfach 6980, 76128 Karlsruhe, Germany and Department of Statistics and Applied Probability University of California, Santa Barbara CA 93106-3110, USA E-mail:
[email protected] Markus Hochst¨ otter¨ Institute of Econometrics, Statistics and Mathematical Finance School of Economics and Business Engineering University of Karlsruhe Postfach 6980, 76128, Karlsruhe, Germany Frank J. Fabozzi Professor in the Practice of Finance School of Management Yale University New Haven, CT USA 1 Abstract Fitting multivariate α-stable distributions to data is still not feasible in higher dimensions since the (non-parametric) spectral measure of the characteristic func- tion is extremely difficult to estimate in dimensions higher than 2. This was shown by Chen and Rachev (1995) and Nolan, Panorska and McCulloch (1996). α-stable sub-Gaussian distributions are a particular (parametric) subclass of the multivariate α-stable distributions. We present and extend a method based on Nolan (2005) to estimate the dispersion matrix of an α-stable sub-Gaussian dis- tribution and estimate the tail index α of the distribution. In particular, we de- velop an estimator for the off-diagonal entries of the dispersion matrix that has statistical properties superior to the normal off-diagonal estimator based on the covariation.