The Power of some Standard tests of stationarity against changes in the unconditional variance

Ibrahim Ahamada and Mohamed Boutahar

Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne

Abstract: Abrupt changes in the unconditional variance of returns have been recently revealed in many empirical studies. In this paper, we show that traditional KPSS-based tests have a low power against nonstationarities stemming from changes in the unconditional variance. More precisely, we show that even under very strong abrupt changes in the unconditional variance, the asymptotic moments of the statistics of these tests remain unchanged. To overcome this problem, we use some CUSUM-based tests adapted for small samples. These tests do not compete with KPSS-based tests and can be considered as complementary. CUSUM-based tests confirm the presence of strong abrupt changes in the unconditional variance of stock returns, whereas KPSS-based tests do not. Consequently, traditional stationary models are not always appropriate to describe stock returns. Finally, we show how a model allowing abrupt changes in the unconditional variance is well appropriate for CAC 40 stock returns

Keywords: KPSS test; panel stationarity test; unconditional variance; abrupt changes; stock returns; size-power curve (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C12 C15 C23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2010-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-ecm and nep-ets
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http://mse.univ-paris1.fr/pub/mse/CES2010/10028.pdf (application/pdf)

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Working Paper: The power of some standard tests of stationarity against changes in the unconditional variance (2010)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mse:cesdoc:10028

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