A New Method for Testing Leverage Effect

Leverage effect often arises in many fields,such as financial risk management, portfolio and option pricing. However,it still remains to be studied that whether there is leverage effect or not in real data. Based on local polynomial regression estimation and Kolmogorov-Smirnov nonparametric test, this paper introduces a new nonparametric test statistic for the leverage effect, and some asymptotic properties are also presented. Simulation studies show that the proposed method performs well. Finally, empirical studies on SP500 index and Microsoft data imply that leverage effect exists in the real data, which is consistent with the idea in finance.