Let's get lade: Robust estimation of semiparametric multiplicative volatility models

We investigate a model in which we connect slowly time varying unconditional long-run volatility with short-run conditional volatility whose representation is given as a semi-strong GARCH(1,1) process with heavy tailed errors. We focus on robust estimation of both long-run and short-run volatilities. Our estimation is semiparametric since the long-run volatility is totally unspecified whereas the short-run conditional volatility is a parametric semi-strong GARCH(1,1) process. We propose different robust estimation methods for nonstationary and strictly stationary GARCH parameters with nonparametric long-run volatility function. Our estimation is based on a two-step LAD procedure. We establish the relevant asymptotic theory of the proposed estimators. Numerical results lend support to our theoretical results.