On the existence and regularity of local times

Abstract: We study the existence and regularity of local times for general $d$-dimensional stochastic processes. We give a general condition for their existence and regularity properties. To emphasize the contribution of our results, we show that they include various prominent examples, among others solutions to stochastic differential equations driven by fractional Brownian motion, where the behavior of the local time was not fully understood up to now and remained as an open problem in the stochastic analysis literature. In particular this completes the picture regarding the local time behavior of such equations, above all includes high dimensions and both large and small Hurst parameters. As other main examples, we also show that by using our general approach, one can quite easily cover and extend some recently obtained results on the local times of the Rosenblatt process and Gaussian quasi-helices.