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

The paper 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 beta-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 breaks 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. Ce papier évalue la performance de plusieurs tests de changement structurel CUSUM et EDF pour la structure dynamique de la variance conditionelle et de la distribution conditionnelle. Nous étudions l'impact 1) de la fréquence des observations, 2) de l'utilisation des données de haute fréquence pour le calcul des variances conditionnelles et 3) de transformation des séries pour améliorer la puissance des tests.