In this paper we focus on two major issues that surround testing for a unit root in practice, namely, (i) uncertainty as to whether or not a linear deterministic trend is present in the data and (ii) uncertainty as to whether the initial condition of the process is (asymptotically) negligible or not. In each case simple testing procedures are proposed with the aim of maintaining good power properties across such uncertainties. For the first issue, if the initial condition is negligible, quasi-differenced (QD) detrended (demeaned) Dickey–Fuller-type unit root tests are near asymptotically efficient when a deterministic trend is (is not) present in the data generating process. Consequently, we compare a variety of strategies that aim to select the detrended variant when a trend is present, and the demeaned variant otherwise. Based on asymptotic and finite-sample evidence, we recommend a simple union of rejections-based decision rule whereby the unit root null hypothesis is rejected whenever either of the detrended or demeaned unit root tests yields a rejection. Our results show that this approach generally outperforms more sophisticated strategies based on auxiliary methods of trend detection. For the second issue, we again recommend a union of rejections decision rule, rejecting the unit root null if either of the QD or ordinary least squares (OLS) detrended/demeaned Dickey–Fuller-type tests rejects. This procedure is also shown to perform well in practice, simultaneously exploiting the superior power of the QD (OLS) detrended/demeaned test for small (large) initial conditions.

This paper considers inference for parameters defined by moment inequalities and equalities. The parameters need not be identified. For a specified class of test statistics, this paper establishes the uniform asymptotic validity of subsampling, m out of n bootstrap, and “plug-in asymptotic” tests and confidence intervals for such parameters. Establishing uniform asymptotic validity is crucial in moment inequality problems because the pointwise asymptotic distributions of the test statistics of interest have discontinuities as functions of the true distribution that generates the observations.

The size results are quite general because they hold without specifying the particular form of the moment conditions—only 2 + δ moments finite are required. The results allow for independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) and dependent observations and for preliminary consistent estimation of identified parameters.

Asymptotic theory is developed for local time density estimation for a general class of functionals of integrated and fractionally integrated time series. The main result provides a convenient basis for developing a limit theory for nonparametric cointegrating regression and nonstationary autoregression. The treatment directly involves local time estimation and the density function of the processes under consideration, providing an alternative approach to the Markov chain and Fourier integral methods that have been used in other recent work on these problems.

Building on work of Hansen (1992, Econometric Theory 8, 489–501), we show weak convergence for power transformations of integrated processes, with possibly serially correlated and heterogeneously distributed increments, to stochastic power integrals. The theory is applicable when testing the unit root or cointegration hypothesis in nonlinear systems by regression-based test statistics.

Standardized slowly varying regressors are shown to be Lp-approximable. This fact allows us to provide alternative proofs of asymptotic expansions of nonstochastic quantities and central limit results due to P.C.B. Phillips, under a less stringent assumption on linear processes. The recourse to stochastic calculus related to Brownian motion can be completely dispensed with.

We establish sufficient conditions on durations that are stationary with finite variance and memory parameter to ensure that the corresponding counting process N(t) satisfies Var N(t) ~ Ct2d+1 (C > 0) as t → ∞, with the same memory parameter that was assumed for the durations. Thus, these conditions ensure that the memory parameter in durations propagates to the same memory parameter in the counts. We then show that any autoregressive conditional duration ACD(1,1) model with a sufficient number of finite moments yields short memory in counts, whereas any long memory stochastic duration model with d > 0 and all finite moments yields long memory in counts, with the same d. Finally, we provide some results about the propagation of long memory to the empirically relevant case of realized variance estimates affected by market microstructure noise contamination.

This paper studies the asymptotic behavior of a Gaussian linear instrumental variables model in which the number of instruments diverges with the sample size. Asymptotic efficiency bounds are obtained for rotation invariant inference procedures and are shown to be attainable by procedures based on the limited information maximum likelihood estimator. The bounds are obtained by characterizing the limiting experiment associated with the model induced by the rotation invariance restriction.

This paper studies a model widely used in the weak instruments literature and establishes admissibility of the weighted average power likelihood ratio tests recently derived by Andrews, Moreira, and Stock (2004, NBER Technical Working Paper 199). The class of tests covered by this admissibility result contains the Anderson and Rubin (1949, Annals of Mathematical Statistics 20, 46–63) test. Thus, there is no conventional statistical sense in which the Anderson and Rubin (1949) test “wastes degrees of freedom.” In addition, it is shown that the test proposed by Moreira (2003, Econometrica 71, 1027–1048) belongs to the closure of (i.e., can be interpreted as a limiting case of) the class of tests covered by our admissibility result.

In this paper, we obtain characterizations of higher order Markov processes in terms of copulas corresponding to their finite-dimensional distributions. The results are applied to establish necessary and sufficient conditions for Markov processes of a given order to exhibit m-dependence, r-independence, or conditional symmetry. The paper also presents a study of applicability and limitations of different copula families in constructing higher order Markov processes with the preceding dependence properties. We further introduce new classes of copulas that allow one to combine Markovness with m-dependence or r-independence in time series.

Consider the unconditional moment restriction E[m(y, υ, w; π0)/fV|w (υ|w) −s (w; π0)] = 0, where m(·) and s(·) are known vector-valued functions of data (y┬, υ, w┬)┬. The smallest asymptotic variance that -consistent regular estimators of π0 can have is calculated when fV|w(·) is only known to be a bounded, continuous, nonzero conditional density function. Our results show that “plug-in” kernel-based estimators of π0 constructed from this type of moment restriction, such as Lewbel (1998, Econometrica 66, 105–121) and Lewbel (2007, Journal of Econometrics 141, 777–806), are semiparametric efficient.

Bartlett corrections are derived for testing hypotheses about the autoregressive parameter ρ in the stable (a) AR(1) model, (b) AR(1) model with intercept, (c) AR(1) model with intercept and linear trend. The correction is found explicitly as a function of ρ. In the models with deterministic terms, the correction factor is asymmetric in ρ. Furthermore, the Bartlett correction is monotonically increasing in ρ and tends to infinity when ρ approaches the stability boundary of + 1. Simulation results indicate that the Bartlett corrections are useful in controlling the size of the likelihood ratio statistic in small samples, although these corrections are not the ultimate panacea.

In this paper, we show that for panel AR(p) models, an instrumental variable (IV) estimator with instruments deviated from past means has the same asymptotic distribution as the infeasible optimal IV estimator when both N and T, the dimensions of the cross section and time series, are large. If we assume that the errors are normally distributed, the asymptotic variance of the proposed IV estimator is shown to attain the lower bound when both N and T are large. A simulation study is conducted to assess the estimator.