The paper presents various tests for assessing whether a time series is subject to drift. We first consider departures from the null hypothesis of no drift against the alternative of a deterministic and/or a non-stationary stochastic drift with initial value zero. We show that the standard...

Quantiles provide a comprehensive description of the properties of a variable and tracking changes in quantiles over time using signal extraction methods can be informative. It is shown here how stationarity tests can be generalized to test the null hypothesis that a particular quantile is...

A copula defines the probability that observations from two time series lie below given quantiles. It is proposed that stationarity tests constructed from indicator variables be used to test against the hypothesis that the copula is changing over time. Tests associated with different quantiles...

The aim of this article is the development of models for converging economies. After discussing models of balanced growth, univariate models of the gap between per capital income in two economies are examined. The preferred models combine unobserved components with an error correction mechanism...

A time-varying quantile can be fitted to a sequence of observations by formulating a time series model for the corresponding population quantile and iteratively applying a suitably modified state space signal extraction algorithm. It is shown that such time-varying quantiles satisfy the defining...

A copula models the relationships between variables independently of their marginal distributions. When the variables are time series, the copula may change over time. A statistical framework is suggested for tracking these changes over time. When the marginal distribu- tions change,...

An EGARCH model in which the conditional distribution is heavy-tailed and skewed is proposed. The properties of the model, including unconditional moments, autocorrelations and the asymptotic distribution of the maximum likelihood estimator, are obtained. Evidence for skewness in conditional...

In dynamic conditional score models, the innovation term of the dynamic specification is the score of the conditional distribution. These models are investigated for non-negative variables, using distributions from the generalized beta and generalized gamma families. The log-normal distribution...

An unobserved components model in which the signal is buried in noise that is non-Gaussian may throw up observations that, when judged by the Gaussian yardstick, are outliers. We describe an observation driven model, based on a conditional Student t-distribution, that is tractable and retains...

We compare two EGARCH models which belong to a new class of models in which the dynamics are driven by the score of the conditional distribution of the observations. Models of this kind are called dynamic conditional score (DCS) models and their form facilitates the development of a...