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Discussion Paper
Stochastic volatility and the distribution of exchange rate news
This paper studies the empirical performance of stochastic volatility models for twenty years of weekly exchange rate data. We concentrate on the effects of the distribution of the exchange rate innovations for parameter estimates and for estimates of the latent volatility series. We approximate the density of the log of exchange rate innovations by a mixture of normals. The major findings of the paper are that: (1) explicitly incorporating fat-tailed innovations increases the estimates of the persistence of volatility dynamics; (ii) estimates of the latent volatility series depend strongly ...