The properties and mechanism of long-term memory in nonparametric volatility

Abstract

Recent empirical literature documents the presence of long-term memory in return volatility. But the mechanism of the existence of long-term memory is still unclear. In this paper, we investigate the origin and properties of long-term memory with nonparametric volatility, using high-frequency time series data of the Chinese Shanghai Composite Stock Price Index. We perform Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) on three different nonparametric volatility estimators with different sampling frequencies. For the same volatility series, the Hurst exponents reduce as the sampling time interval increases, but they are still larger than 1/2, which means that no matter how the interval changes, it still cannot change the existence of long memory. RRV presents a relatively stable property on long-term memory and is less influenced by sampling frequency. RV and RBV have some evolutionary trends depending on time intervals, which indicating that the jump component has no significant impact on the long-term memory property. This suggests that the presence of long-term memory in nonparametric volatility can be contributed to the integrated variance component. Considering the impact of microstructure noise, RBV and RRV still present long-term memory under various time intervals. We can infer that the presence of long-term memory in realized volatility is not affected by market microstructure noise. Our findings imply that the long-term memory phenomenon is an inherent characteristic of the data generating process, not a result of microstructure noise or volatility clustering.