Tests of Short Memory With Thick-Tailed Errors

Abstract

In this article, we consider the robustness to fat tails of four stationarity tests. We also consider their sensitivity to the number of lags used in long-run variance estimation, and the power of the tests. Lo's modified rescaled range (MR/S) test is not very robust. Choi's Lagrange multiplier (LM) test has excellent robustness properties but is not generally as powerful as the Kwiatkowski–Phillips–Schmidt–Shin (KPSS) test. As an analytical framework for fat tails, we suggest local-to-finite variance asymptotics, based on a representation of the process as a weighted sum of a finite variance process and an infinite variance process, where the weights depend on the sample size and a constant. The sensitivity of the asymptotic distribution of a test to the weighting constant is a good indicator of its robustness to fat tails. This article has supplementary material online.