A note on non-negative continuous time processes

Recently there has been much work on developing models that are suitable for analysing the volatility of a continuous time process. One general approach is to define a volatility process as the convolution of a kernel with a non-decreasing Lévy process, which is non-negative if the kernel is non-negative. Within the framework of time continuous autoregressive moving average (CARMA) processes, we derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the kernel to be non-negative. This condition is in terms of the Laplace transform of the CARMA kernel, which has a simple form. We discuss some useful consequences of this result and delineate the parametric region of stationarity and non-negative kernel for some lower order CARMA models. Copyright 2005 Royal Statistical Society.