The aim of this study is to develop a bias‐correction method for realized variance (RV) estimation, where the equilibrium price process is contaminated with market microstructure noise, such as bid–ask bounces and price‐change discreteness. Although RV constitutes the simplest estimator of daily integrated variance, it remains strongly biased, and many estimators proposed in previous studies require prior knowledge about the dependence structure of microstructure noise to ensure unbiasedness and consistency. The dependence structure is unknown however, and needs to be estimated. A bias‐correction method based on statistical inference from the general noise dependence structure is thus proposed. The results of Monte Carlo simulation indicate that the new approach is robust with respect to changes in the dependence of microstructure noise.
