Let F denote a distribution function defined on the probability space (Ω,,P), which is absolutely continuous with respect to the Lebesgue measure in Rd with probability density function f. Let f0(·,β) be a parametric density function that depends on an unknown p × 1 vector β. In this paper, we consider tests of the goodness-of-fit of f0(·,β) for f(·) for some β based on (i) the integrated squared difference between a kernel estimate of f(·) and the quasimaximum likelihood estimate of f0(·,β) denoted by In and (ii) the integrated squared difference between a kernel estimate of f(·) and the corresponding kernel smoothed estimate of f0(·, β) denoted by Jn. It is shown in this paper that the amount of smoothing applied to the data in constructing the kernel estimate of f(·) determines the form of the test statistic based on In. For each test developed, we also examine its asymptotic properties including consistency and the local power property. In particular, we show that tests developed in this paper, except the first one, are more powerful than the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test under the sequence of local alternatives introduced in Rosenblatt [12], although they are less powerful than the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test under the sequence of Pitman alternatives. A small simulation study is carried out to examine the finite sample performance of one of these tests.

We suggest a sequential monitoring scheme to detect changes in the parameters of a GARCH(p,q) sequence. The procedure is based on quasi-likelihood scores and does not use model residuals. Unlike for linear regression models, the squared residuals of nonlinear time series models such as generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) do not satisfy a functional central limit theorem with a Wiener process as a limit, so its boundary crossing probabilities cannot be used. Our procedure nevertheless has an asymptotically controlled size, and, moreover, the conditions on the boundary function are very simple; it can be chosen as a constant. We establish the asymptotic properties of our monitoring scheme under both the null of no change in parameters and the alternative of a change in parameters and investigate its finite-sample behavior by means of a small simulation study.This research was partially supported by NSF grant INT-0223262 and NATO grant PST.CLG.977607. The work of the first author was supported by the Hungarian National Foundation for Scientific Research, grants T 29621, 37886; the work of the second author was supported by NSERC Canada.

This paper presents conditions under which a quadratic form based on a g-inverted weighting matrix converges to a chi-square distribution as the sample size goes to infinity. Subject to fairly weak underlying conditions, a necessary and sufficient condition is given for this result. The result is of interest because it is needed to establish asymptotic significance levels and local power properties of generalized Wald tests (i.e., Wald tests with singular limiting covariance matrices). Included in this class of tests are Hausman specification tests and various goodness-of-fit tests, among others. The necessary and sufficient condition is relevant to procedures currently in the econometrics literature because it illustrates that some results stated in the literature only hold under more restrictive assumptions than those given.

In [4] Chan and Tran give the limit theory for the least-squares coefficient in a random walk with i.i.d. (identically and independently distributed) errors that are in the domain of attraction of a stable law. This paper discusses their results and provides generalizations to the case of I(1) processes with weakly dependent errors whose distributions are in the domain of attraction of a stable law. General unit root tests are also studied. It is shown that the semiparametric corrections suggested by the author in other work [22] for the finite-variance case continue to work when the errors have infinite variance. Surprisingly, no modifications to the formulas given in [22] are required. The limit laws are expressed in terms of ratios of quadratic functional of a stable process rather than Brownian motion. The correction terms that eliminate nuisance parameter dependencies are random in the limit and involve multiple stochastic integrals that may be written in terms of the quadratic variation of the limiting stable process. Some extensions of these results to models with drifts and time trends are also indicated.

This paper describes some techniques for proving asymptotic normality of statistics defined by maximization of random criterion function. The techniques are based on a combination of recent results from the theory of empirical processes and a method of Huber for the study of maximum likelihood estimators under nonstandard conditions.

Likelihood ratio tests for restrictions on cointegrating vectors are asymptotically χ2 distributed. For some values of the parameters this asymptotic distribution does not give a good approximation to the finite sample distribution. In this paper we derive the Bartlett correction factor for the likelihood ratio test and show by some simulation experiments that it can be a useful tool for making inference.

This paper studies a class of Markov models that consist of two components. Typically, one of the components is observable and the other is unobservable or “hidden.” Conditions under which geometric ergodicity of the unobservable component is inherited by the joint process formed of the two components are given. This implies existence of initial values such that the joint process is strictly stationary and β-mixing. In addition to this, conditions for the existence of moments are also obtained, and extensions to the case of nonstationary initial values are provided. All these results are applied to a general model that includes as special cases various first-order generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) and autoregressive conditional duration (ACD) models with possibly complicated nonlinear structures. The results only require mild moment assumptions and in some cases provide necessary and sufficient conditions for geometric ergodicity.

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 studies the qualitative robustness properties of the Schwarz information criterion (SIC) based on objective functions defining M-estimators. A definition of qualitative robustness appropriate for model selection is provided and it is shown that the crucial restriction needed to achieve robustness in model selection is the uniform boundedness of the objective function. In the process, the asymptotic performance of the SIC for general M-estimators is also studied. The paper concludes with a Monte Carlo study of the finite sample behavior of the SIC for different specifications of the sample objective function.

In this paper we introduce the generalized fluctuation test for monitoring structural changes and establish a result characterizing the limiting behavior of this class of tests. As applications of the generalized fluctuation test, tests based on the maximum and range of the fluctuation of moving estimates are proposed. We also derive the boundary functions for the proposed tests and tabulate simulated critical values. Our simulations indicate that these tests compare favorably with the recursive-estimates-based test considered by Chu, Stinchcombe, and White (1996, Econometrica 64, 1045–1065) when a change occurs late.

This article considers methods of simulated moments for estimation of discrete response models. It is possible to use the same set of random numbers to simulate the choice probabilities for each individual in the sample. In addition to the method of simulated moments of McFadden, we have considered also maximum simulated likelihood estimation methods. An asymptotic theory for such procedures is provided. The estimators are shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal by the theory of generalized U-statistics. Asymptotic efficiency is discussed. Monte Carlo experiments on the finite sample performance of the estimators are reported.

For a first-order autoregressive process Yt = βYt−1 + ∈t where the ∈t'S are i.i.d. and belong to the domain of attraction of a stable law, the strong consistency of the ordinary least-squares estimator bn of β is obtained for β = 1, and the limiting distribution of bn is established as a functional of a Lévy process. Generalizations to seasonal difference models are also considered. These results are useful in testing for the presence of unit roots when the ∈t'S are heavy-tailed.

The presence of permanent volatility shifts in key macroeconomic and financial variables in developed economies appears to be relatively common. Conventional unit root tests are unreliable in the presence of such behavior, having nonpivotal asymptotic null distributions. In this paper we propose a bootstrap approach to unit root testing that is valid in the presence of a wide class of permanent variance changes that includes single and multiple (abrupt and smooth transition) volatility change processes as special cases. We make use of the so-called wild bootstrap principle, which preserves the heteroskedasticity present in the original shocks. Our proposed method does not require the practitioner to specify any parametric model for the volatility process. Numerical evidence suggests that the bootstrap tests perform well in finite samples against a range of nonstationary volatility processes.We thank two anonymous referees, Paulo Rodrigues, Peter Phillips, and seminar participants at the URCT conference held in Faro, Portugal, September 29 to October 1, 2005, for helpful comments on previous versions of this paper.

Consistency of kernel estimators of the long-run covariance matrix of a linear process is established under weak moment and memory conditions. In addition, it is pointed out that some existing consistency proofs are in error as they stand.

This paper develops optimal tests for model selection between two nested models in the presence of underlying parameter instability. These are joint tests for both parameter instability and a null hypothesis on a subset of the parameters. They modify the existing tests for parameter instability to allow the parameter vector to be unknown. These test statistics are useful if one is interested in testing a null hypothesis on some parameters but is worried about the possibility that the parameters may be time varying. The paper provides the asymptotic distributions of this class of test statistics and their critical values for some interesting cases.I thank M. Watson for the idea of this paper and for numerous discussions, suggestions, comments, and teaching. I am grateful to T. Clark, G. Chow, R. Gallant, F. Sowell, N. Swanson, E. Tamer, and A. Tarozzi and also to the co-editor and two referees and to seminar participants at the University of Virginia, ECARES Université Libre de Brussels, the 2001 Triangle Econometrics Conference, the 2002 NBER Summer Institute, the 2003 Summer Meetings of the Econometric Society, and the 2003 EC2 Conference for comments. Financial support from IFS Summer Research, Princeton University, is gratefully acknowledged. All mistakes are mine.

This paper studies the smooth transition regression model where regressors are I(1) and errors are I(0). The regressors and errors are assumed to be dependent both serially and contemporaneously. Using the triangular array asymptotics, the nonlinear least squares estimator is shown to be consistent, and its asymptotic distribution is derived. It is found that the asymptotic distribution involves a bias under the regressor-error dependence, which implies that the nonlinear least squares estimator is inefficient and unsuitable for use in hypothesis testing. Thus, this paper proposes a Gauss–Newton type estimator that uses the nonlinear least squares estimator as an initial estimator and is based on regressions augmented by leads and lags. Using leads and lags enables the Gauss–Newton estimator to eliminate the bias and have a mixture normal distribution in the limit, which makes it more efficient than the nonlinear least squares estimator and suitable for use in hypothesis testing. Simulation results indicate that the results obtained from the triangular array asymptotics provide reasonable approximations for the finite-sample properties of the estimators and t-tests when sample sizes are moderately large. The cointegrating smooth transition regression model is applied to the Korean and Indonesian data from the Asian currency crisis of 1997. The estimation results partially support the interest Laffer curve hypothesis. But overall the effects of interest rate on spot exchange rate are shown to be quite negligible in both nations.This paper was partly written while the first author was visiting the Institute of Statistics and Econometrics at Humboldt University, Berlin. This author acknowledges financial support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation under a Humboldt Research Award and from the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation. The second author wrote this paper while visiting the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University. This author thanks the faculty and staff of the Cowles Foundation, especially Don Andrews, John Geanakoplos, David Pearce, Peter Phillips, and Nora Wiedenbach, for their support and hospitality. The second author was financially supported for the research in this paper by Kookmin University. The authors thank Don Andrews, Helmut Lütkepohl, Peter Phillips, Bruce Hansen, and two referees for their valuable comments on this paper. Part of the data studied in this paper was provided by Chi-Young Song, whom we thank.

Testing the cointegrating rank of a vector autoregressive process with an intercept is considered. In addition to the likelihood ratio (LR) tests developed by Johansen and Juselius (1990, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 52, 169–210) and others we also consider an alternative class of tests that is based on estimating the trend parameters of the deterministic term in a different way. The asymptotic local power of these tests is derived and compared to that of the corresponding LR tests. The small sample properties are investigated by simulations. The new tests are seen to be substantially more powerful than conventional LR tests.

We consider the linear regression model with censored dependent variable, where the disturbance terms are restricted only to have zero conditional median (or other prespecified quantile) given the regressors and the censoring point. Thus, the functional form of the conditional distribution of the disturbances is unrestricted, permitting heteroskedasticity of unknown form. For this model, a lower bound for the asymptotic covariance matrix for regular estimators of the regression coefficients is derived. This lower bound corresponds to the covariance matrix of an optimally weighted censored least absolute deviations estimator, where the optimal weight is the conditional density at zero of the disturbance. We also show how an estimator that attains this lower bound can be constructed, via nonparametric estimation of the conditional density at zero of the disturbance. As a special case our results apply to the (uncensored) linear model under a conditional median restriction.

In this paper, two competing types of multistep predictors, i.e., plug-in and direct predictors, are considered in autoregressive (AR) processes. When a working model AR(k) is used for the h-step prediction with h > 1, the plug-in predictor is obtained from repeatedly using the fitted (by least squares) AR(k) model with an unknown future value replaced by their own forecasts, and the direct predictor is obtained by estimating the h-step prediction model's coefficients directly by linear least squares. Under rather mild conditions, asymptotic expressions for the mean-squared prediction errors (MSPEs) of these two predictors are obtained in stationary cases. In addition, we also extend these results to models with deterministic time trends. Based on these expressions, performances of the plug-in and direct predictors are compared. Finally, two examples are given to illustrate that some stationary case results on these MSPEs can not be generalized to the nonstationary case.The author is deeply grateful to the co-editor Pentti Saikkonen and two referees for their helpful suggestions and comments on a previous version of this paper.

We propose a new test against a change in correlation at an unknown point in time based on cumulated sums of empirical correlations. The test does not require that inputs are independent and identically distributed under the null. We derive its limiting null distribution using a new functional delta method argument, provide a formula for its local power for particular types of structural changes, give some Monte Carlo evidence on its finite-sample behavior, and apply it to recent stock returns.