Classical and Bayesian aspects of robust unit root inference

This paper has two themes. First, we classify some effects which outliers in the data have on unit root inference. We show that, both in a classical and a Bayesian framework, the presence of additive outliers moves ‘standard’ inference towards stationarity. Second, we base inference on an independent Student-t instead of a Gaussian likelihood. This yields results that are less sensitive to the presence of outliers. Application to several time series with outliers reveals a negative correlation between the unit root and degrees of freedom parameter of the Student-t distribution. Therefore, imposing normality may incorrectly provide evidence against the unit root.

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