| Abstract: | Student’s t-distributions are widely used in financial studies as heavy-tailed alternatives to normal distributions. As these distributions are not closed under convolution, there exist no Lévy processes with Student’s t-marginals at all points in time. In this article we show that a Student’s t-approximation of these marginals is still suitable, while not exact. Using this approximation, we are able to describe the scaling behavior of such Lévy-Student processes and the parameters of its marginal distributions by a simple analytical scaling law. This scaling law drastically simplifies the use of Lévy-Student processes as a general diffusion process in various interdisciplinary applications. We explicitly provide an application in the context of modelling high-frequency price returns. |
