This paper develops tests of the null hypothesis of linearity in the context of autoregressive models with Markov-switching means and variances. These tests are robust to the identification failures that plague conventional likelihood-based inference methods. The approach exploits the moments of...

When Barret and Donald (2003) in Econometrica proposed a consistent test of stochastic dominance, they were silent about the asymptotic unbiasedness of their tests against (square root) n-converging Pitman local alternatives. This paper shows that when we focus on first-order stochastic...