Many key macro-economic and financial variables are characterised by permanent changes in unconditional volatility. In this paper we analyse vector autoregressions with non-stationary (unconditional) volatility of a very general form, which includes single and multiple volatility breaks as...

In the context of regression-based (quarterly) seasonal unit root tests, we examine the impact of initial conditions (one for each quarter) of the process on test power. We investigate the behaviour of the well-known OLS detrended HEGY seasonal unit root tests together with their...

In practice a degree of uncertainty will always exist concerning what specification to adopt for the deterministic trend function when running unit root tests. While most macroeconomic time series appear to display an underlying trend, it is often far from clear whether this component is best...

It is well known that it is vital to account for trend breaks when testing for a unit root. In practice, uncertainty exists over whether or not a trend break is present and, if it is, where it is located. Harris et al. (2009) and Carrion-i-Silvestre et al. (2009) propose procedures which account...

This article examines the behaviour of some recently proposed 'robust' (to the order of integration of the data) tests for the presence of a deterministic linear trend in a univariate times series in situations where the magnitude of the initial condition of the series is non-negligible. We...

Recent approaches to testing for a unit root when uncertainty exists over the presence and timing of a trend break employ break detection methods, so that a with-break unit root test is used only if a break is detected by some auxiliary statistic. While these methods achieve near asymptotic...

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First we extend the large sample results provided for the augmented Dickey-Fuller test by Said and Dickey (1984) and Chang and Park (2002) to the case of the augmented seasonal unit root tests of Hylleberg et al. (1990) [HEGY], inter alia. Our analysis...

Being able to correctly characterise an observed time series into its separate difference stationary and trend stationary regimes, should they exist, has important implications for effective model building and forecasting in economics and finance. Existing ratio-based statistics test the null...

We consider the power of unit root tests for different deviations of the initial observation from the deterministic component of the series. Following recent work highlighting the relative power performance of extant tests, we propose a new procedure based on a data-dependent weighted average of...