Efficient and feasible inference for the components of financial variation using blocked multipower variation

High frequency financial data allows us to learn more about volatility, volatility of volatility and jumps. One of the key techniques developed in the literature in recent years has been bipower variation and its multipower extension, which estimates time-varying volatility robustly to jumps. We improve the scope and efficiency of multipower variation by the use of a more sophisticated exploitation of high frequency data. This suggests very significant improvements in the power of jump tests. It also yields efficiency estimates of the integrated variance of the continuous part of a semimartingale. The paper also shows how to extend the theory to the case where there is microstructure in the observations and derive the first nonparametric high frequency estimator of the volatility of volatility. A fundamental device in the paper is a new type of result showing path-by-path (strong) approximation between multipower and the (unobserved) RV based on the continuous part of the process.