The Memory of Volatility

Kai Wenger, Christian Leschinski and Philipp Sibbertsen

Hannover Economic Papers (HEP) from Leibniz Universität Hannover, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät

Abstract: The focus of the volatility literature on forecasting and the predominance of the conceptually simpler HAR model over long memory stochastic volatility models has led to the fact that the actual degree of memory estimates has rarely been considered. Estimates in the literature range roughly between 0.4 and 0.6 - that is from the higher stationary to the lower non-stationary region. This difference, however, has important practical implications - such as the existence or non-existence of the fourth moment of the return distribution. Inference on the memory order is complicated by the presence of measurement error in realized volatility and the potential of spurious long memory. In this paper we provide a comprehensive analysis of the memory in variances of international stock indices and exchange rates. On the one hand, we find that the variance of exchange rates is subject to spurious long memory and the true memory parameter is in the higher stationary range. Stock index variances, on the other hand, are free of low frequency contaminations and the memory is in the lower non-stationary range. These results are obtained using state of the art local Whittle methods that allow consistent estimation in presence of perturbations or low frequency contaminations.

Keywords: Realized Volatility; Long Memory; Perturbation; Spurious Long Memory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C12 C22 C58 G15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2017-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm, nep-ets and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://diskussionspapiere.wiwi.uni-hannover.de/pdf_bib/dp-601.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:han:dpaper:dp-601

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Hannover Economic Papers (HEP) from Leibniz Universität Hannover, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Heidrich, Christian ().