Score driven asymmetric stochastic volatility models

In this paper we propose a new class of asymmetric stochastic volatility (SV) models, which specifies the volatility as a function of the score of the distribution of returns conditional on volatilities based on the Generalized Autoregressive Score (GAS) model. Different specifications of the log-volatility are obtained by assuming different return error distributions. In particular, we consider three of the most popular distributions, namely, the Normal, Student-t and Generalized Error Distribution and derive the statistical properties of each of the corresponding score driven SV models. We show that some of the parameters cannot be property identified by the moments usually considered as to describe the stylized facts of financial returns, namely, excess kurtosis, autocorrelations of squares and cross-correlations between returns and future squared returns. The parameters of some restricted score driven SV models can be estimated adequately using a MCMC procedure. Finally, the new proposed models are fitted to financial returns and evaluated in terms of their in-sample and out-of-sample performanceFinancial support from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, research project ECO2012-32401, is acknowledged. The third author is also grateful for project MTM2010-1732