Long-range dependence in returns and volatility of Central European Stock Indices

In the paper, we research on the presence of long-range dependence in returns and volatility of Hungarian (BUX), Czech (PX) and Polish (WIG) stock indices between years 1997 and 2009 with a use of classical and modified rescaled range and rescaled variance analyses. Moving block bootstrap with pre-whitening and post-blackening is used for a construc- tion of confidence intervals for the hypothesis testing. We show that there is no significant long-range dependence in returns of all examined indices. However, significant long-range dependence is detected in volatility of all three indices. The results for returns are contradictory with several stud- ies which claim that developing markets are persistent. However, majority of these studies either do not use the confidence intervals at all or only the ones based on standard normal distribution. Therefore, the results of such studies should be reexamined and reinterpreted.