Local times and Tanaka--Meyer formulae for càdlàg paths

Abstract: Three concepts of local times for deterministic c{`a}dl{`a}g paths are developed and the corresponding pathwise Tanaka--Meyer formulae are provided. For semimartingales, it is shown that their sample paths a.s. satisfy all three pathwise definitions of local times and that all coincide with the classical semimartingale local time. In particular, this demonstrates that each definition constitutes a legit pathwise counterpart of probabilistic local times. The last pathwise construction presented in the paper expresses local times in terms of normalized numbers of interval crossings and does not depend on the choice of the sequence of grids. This is a new result also for c{`a}dl{`a}g semimartingales, which may be related to previous results of Nicole El~Karoui and Marc Lemieux.