The Impact of Sampling Frequency and Volatility Estimators on Change-Point Tests

The article evaluates the performance of several recently proposed change-point tests applied to conditional variance dynamics and conditional distributions of asset returns. These are CUSUM-type tests for β-mixing processes and EDF-based tests for the residuals of such nonlinear dependent processes. Hence the tests apply to the class of ARCH- and SV-type processes as well as data-driven volatility estimators using high-frequency data. It is shown that some of the high-frequency volatility estimators substantially improve the power of the structural break tests, especially for detecting changes in the tail of the conditional distribution. Similarly certain types of filtering and transformation of the returns process can improve the power of CUSUM statistics. We also explore the impact of sampling frequency on each of the test statistics. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.