A local limit theorem is proved for sample covariances of nonstationary time series and integrable functions of such time series that involve a bandwidth sequence. The resulting theory enables an asymptotic development of nonparametric regression with integrated or fractionally integrated processes that includes the important practical case of spurious regressions. Some local regression diagnostics are suggested for forensic analysis of such regresssions, including a local R2 and a local Durbin–Watson (DW) ratio, and their asymptotic behavior is investigated. The most immediate findings extend the earlier work on linear spurious regression (Phillips, 1986, Journal of Econometrics 33, 311–340) showing that the key behavioral characteristics of statistical significance, low DW ratios and moderate to high R2 continue to apply locally in nonparametric spurious regression. Some further applications of the limit theory to models of nonlinear functional relations and cointegrating regressions are given. The methods are also shown to be applicable in partial linear semiparametric nonstationary regression.

For a simplified structural equation/IV regression model with one right-side endogenous variable, we derive the exact conditional distribution function of Moreira's (2003) conditional likelihood ratio (CLR) test statistic. This is used to obtain the critical value function needed to implement the CLR test, and reasonably comprehensive graphical versions of this function are provided for practical use. The analogous functions are also obtained for the case of testing more than one right-side endogenous coefficient, but in this case for a similar test motivated by, but not generally the same as, the likelihood ratio test. Next, the exact power functions of the CLR test, the Anderson-Rubin test, and the Lagrange multiplier test suggested by Kleibergen (2002) are derived and studied. The CLR test is shown to clearly conditionally dominate the other two tests for virtually all parameter configurations, but no test considered is either inadmissable or uniformly superior to the other two. The unconditional distribution function of the likelihood ratio test statistic is also derived using the same argument. This shows that both exactly, and under Staiger/Stock weak-instrument asymptotics, the test based on the usual asymptotic critical value is always oversized and can be very seriously so when the number of instruments is large.

We study test procedures that detect structural breaks in underlying data sequences. In particular, we wish to discriminate between different reasons for these changes, such as (1) shifting means, (2) random walk behavior, and (3) constant means but innovations switching from stationary to difference stationary behavior. Almost all procedures presently available in the literature are simultaneously sensitive to all three types of alternatives.

The test statistics under investigation are based on functionals of the partial sums of observations. These cumulative sum–type (CUSUM-type) statistics have limit distributions if the mean remains constant and the errors satisfy the central limit theorem but tend to infinity in the case when any of the alternatives (1), (2), or (3) holds. On removing the effect of the shifting mean, however, divergence of the test statistics will only occur under the random walk behavior, which in turn enables statisticians not only to detect structural breaks but also to specify their causes.

The results are underlined by a simulation study and an application to returns of the German stock index DAX.

This paper discusses nonparametric models for panels of time series. There is already a substantial literature on nonlinear models and nonparametric methods in a regression and time series setting. But almost without exception these developments have been limited to univariate and multivariate models of moderate dimensions. Very little has been done for panels, where the dimension, often corresponding to a number of individuals, typically is very large but where the number of observations for each individual may be small or moderate. It is the aim of this paper to start a systematic theoretical treatment of nonparametric models for panels of time series, in particular on additive models. Extending existing methodology to the panel situation is by no means trivial because already for the parametric case many problems are unsolved. Our estimation approach is based on backfitting methods.

Designed to have power against all alternatives, omnibus consistent tests are the primary econometric tools for testing the correct specification of parametric conditional means when there is no information about the possible alternative. The main purpose of this paper is to show that, contrary to what is generally believed, omnibus specification tests only have substantial local power against alternatives in a finite-dimensional space (usually unknown to the researcher). We call such a space the principal space. We characterize and estimate the principal space for Cramér–von Mises tests. These results are some of the by-products of a detailed theoretical power analysis carried out in the paper. This investigation focuses on the class of the so-called integrated consistent tests under possibly heteroskedastic time series. A Monte Carlo experiment examines the finite-sample properties of tests and estimators of preferred alternatives. Finally, an application of our theory to test the martingale difference hypothesis of some exchange rates provides new information on the rejection of omnibus tests and illustrates our findings.

This paper investigates selection and averaging of linear regressions with a possible structural break. Our main contribution is the construction of a Mallows criterion for the structural break model. We show that the correct penalty term is nonstandard and depends on unknown parameters, but it can be approximated by an average of limiting cases to yield a feasible penalty with good performance. Following Hansen (2007, Econometrica 75, 1175–1189) we recommend averaging the structural break estimates with the no-break estimates where the weight is selected to minimize the Mallows criterion. This estimator is simple to compute, as the weights are a simple function of the ratio of the penalty to the Andrews SupF test statistic.

To assess performance we focus on asymptotic mean-squared error (AMSE) in a local asymptotic framework. We show that the AMSE of the estimators depends exclusively on the parameter variation function. Numerical comparisons show that the unrestricted least-squares and pretest estimators have very large AMSE for certain regions of the parameter space, whereas our averaging estimator has AMSE close to the infeasible optimum.

In this paper we provide a unified theory, and associated invariance principle, for the large-sample distributions of the Dickey–Fuller class of statistics when applied to unit root processes driven by innovations displaying nonstationary stochastic volatility of a very general form. These distributions are shown to depend on both the spot volatility and the integrated variation associated with the innovation process. We propose a partial solution (requiring any leverage effects to be asymptotically negligible) to the identified inference problem using a wild bootstrap–based approach. Results are initially presented in the context of martingale differences and are later generalized to allow for weak dependence. Monte Carlo evidence is also provided that suggests that our proposed bootstrap tests perform very well in finite samples in the presence of a range of innovation processes displaying nonstationary volatility and/or weak dependence.

Some exact distribution theory is developed for structural equation models with and without identities. The theory includes LIML, IV, and OLS. We relate the new results to earlier studies in the literature, including the pioneering work of Bergstrom (1962). General IV exact distribution formulas for a structural equation model without an identity are shown to apply also to models with an identity by specializing along a certain asymptotic parameter sequence. Some of the new exact results are obtained by means of a uniform asymptotic expansion. An interesting consequence of the new theory is that the uniform asymptotic approximation provides the exact distribution of the OLS estimator in the model considered by Bergstrom (1962). This example appears to be the first instance in the statistical literature of a uniform approximation delivering an exact expression for a probability density.

This paper presents a family of simple nonparametric unit root tests indexed by one parameter, d, and containing the Breitung (2002, Journal of Econometrics 108, 342–363) test as the special case d = 1. It is shown that (a) each member of the family with d > 0 is consistent, (b) the asymptotic distribution depends on d and thus reflects the parameter chosen to implement the test, and (c) because the asymptotic distribution depends on d and the test remains consistent for all d > 0, it is possible to analyze the power of the test for different values of d. The usual Phillips–Perron and Dickey–Fuller type tests are indexed by bandwidth, lag length, etc., but have none of these three properties.

It is shown that members of the family with d < 1 have higher asymptotic local power than the Breitung (2002) test, and when d is small the asymptotic local power of the proposed nonparametric test is relatively close to the parametric power envelope, particularly in the case with a linear time trend. Furthermore, generalized least squares (GLS) detrending is shown to improve power when d is small, which is not the case for the Breitung (2002) test. Simulations demonstrate that when applying a sieve bootstrap procedure, the proposed variance ratio test has very good size properties, with finite-sample power that is higher than that of the Breitung (2002) test and even rivals the (nearly) optimal parametric GLS detrended augmented Dickey–Fuller test with lag length chosen by an information criterion.

An asymptotic theory is developed for multivariate regression in cointegrated systems whose variables are moderately integrated or moderately explosive in the sense that they have autoregressive roots of the form ρni = 1 + ci/nα, involving moderate deviations from unity when α ∈ (0, 1) and ci ∈ ℝ are constant parameters. When the data are moderately integrated in the stationary direction (with ci < 0), it is shown that least squares regression is consistent and asymptotically normal but suffers from significant bias, related to simultaneous equations bias. In the moderately explosive case (where ci > 0) the limit theory is mixed normal with Cauchy-type tail behavior, and the rate of convergence is explosive, as in the case of a moderately explosive scalar autoregression (Phillips and Magdalinos, 2007, Journal of Econometrics 136, 115–130). Moreover, the limit theory applies without any distributional assumptions and for weakly dependent errors under conventional moment conditions, so an invariance principle holds, unlike the well-known case of an explosive autoregression. This theory validates inference in cointegrating regression with mildly explosive regressors. The special case in which the regressors themselves have a common explosive component is also considered.

This paper investigates stationarity of the so-called integrated Markov-switching generalized autoregressive conditionally heteroskedastic (GARCH) process, which is an important subclass of the Markov-switching GARCH process introduced by Francq, Roussignol, and Zakoïan (2001, Journal of Time Series Analysis 22,197–220) and a Markov-switching version of the integrated GARCH (IGARCH) process. We show that, like the classical IGARCH process, a stationary solution with infinite variance for the integrated Markov-switching GARCH process may exist. To this purpose, an alternative condition for the existence of a strictly stationary solution of the Markov-switching GARCH process is presented, and some results obtained in Hennion (1997, Annals of Probability 25, 1545–1587) are employed. In addition, we also discuss conditions for the existence of a strictly stationary solution of the Markov-switching GARCH process with finite variance, which is a modification of Theorem 2 in Francq et al. (2001).

We consider a multivariate continuous-time process, generated by a system of linear stochastic differential equations, driven by white noise, and involving coefficients that possibly vary over time. The process is observable only at discrete, but not necessarily equally-spaced, time points (though equal spacing significantly simplifies matters). Such settings represent partial extensions of ones studied extensively by A.R. Bergstrom. A model for the observed time series is deduced. Initially we focus on a first-order model, but higher-order models are discussed in the case of equally-spaced observations. Some discussion of issues of statistical inference is included.

We propose generalized portmanteau-type test statistics in the frequency domain to test independence between two stationary time series. The test statistics are formed analogous to the one in the paper by Chen and Deo (2004, Econometric Theory 20, 382–416), who extended the applicability of the portmanteau goodness-of-fit test to the long memory case. Under the null hypothesis of independence, the asymptotic standard normal distributions of the proposed statistics are derived under fairly mild conditions. In particular, each time series is allowed to possess short memory, long memory, or antipersistence. A simulation study shows that the tests have reasonable size and power properties.

In this paper we develop a simple procedure that delivers tests for the presence of a broken trend in a univariate time series that do not require knowledge of the form of serial correlation in the data and are robust as to whether the shocks are generated by an I(0) or an I(1) process. Two trend break models are considered: the first holds the level fixed while allowing the trend to break, while the latter allows for a simultaneous break in level and trend. For the known break date case, our proposed tests are formed as a weighted average of the optimal tests appropriate for I(0) and I(1) shocks. The weighted statistics are shown to have standard normal limiting null distributions and to attain the Gaussian asymptotic local power envelope, in each case regardless of whether the shocks are I(0) or I(1). In the unknown break date case, we adopt the method of Andrews (1993) and take a weighted average of the statistics formed as the supremum over all possible break dates, subject to a trimming parameter, in both the I(0) and I(1) environments. Monte Carlo evidence suggests that our tests are in most cases more powerful, often substantially so, than the robust broken trend tests of Sayginsoy and Vogelsang (2004). An empirical application highlights the practical usefulness of our proposed tests.

The top-order zonal polynomials Ck(A), and top-order invariant polynomials Ck1,…,kr (A1, …, Ar) in which each of the partitions of ki, i = 1, …, r, has only one part, occur frequently in multivariate distribution theory, and econometrics — see, for example, Phillips (1980, Econometrica 48, 861–878; 1984, Journal of Econometrics 26, 387–398; 1985, International Economic Review 26, 21–36; 1986, Econometrica 54, 881–896), Hillier (1985, Econometric Theory 1, 53–72; 2001, Econometric Theory 17, 1–28), Hillier and Satchell (1986, Econometric Theory 2, 66–74), and Smith (1989, Journal of Multivariate Analysis 31, 244–257; 1993, Australian Journal of Statistics 35, 271–282). However, even with the recursive algorithms of Ruben (1962, Annals of Mathematical Statistics 33, 542–570) and Chikuse (1987, Econometric Theory 3, 195–207), numerical evaluation of these invariant polynomials is extremely time consuming. As a result, the value of invariant polynomials has been largely confined to analytic work on distribution theory. In this paper we present new, very much more efficient, algorithms for computing both the top-order zonal and invariant polynomials. These results should make the theoretical results involving these functions much more valuable for direct practical study. We demonstrate the value of our results by providing fast and accurate algorithms for computing the moments of a ratio of quadratic forms in normal random variables.

The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, a characterization theorem of the subhypotheses comprising the seasonal unit root hypothesis is presented that provides a precise formulation of the alternative hypotheses associated with regression- based seasonal unit root tests. Second, it proposes regression-based tests for the seasonal unit root hypothesis that allow a general seasonal aspect for the data and are similar both exactly and asymptotically with respect to initial values and seasonal drift parameters. Third, limiting distribution theory is given for these statistics where, in contrast to previous papers in the literature, in doing so it is not assumed that unit roots hold at all of the zero and seasonal frequencies. This is shown to alter the large-sample null distribution theory for regression t-statistics for unit roots at the complex frequencies, but interestingly to not affect the limiting null distributions of the regression t-statistics for unit roots at the zero and Nyquist frequencies and regression F-statistics for unit roots at the complex frequencies. Our results therefore have important implications for how tests of the seasonal unit root hypothesis should be conducted in practice. Associated simulation evidence on the size and power properties of the statistics presented in this paper is given that is consonant with the predictions from the large-sample theory.