ROBUST UNIT ROOT TESTS FOR SEASONAL AUTOREGRESSIVE PROCESS

The stationarity is one of the most important properties of a time series. We propose robust sign tests for seasonal autoregressive process to determine whether or not a time series is stationary. The tests have an exact binomial null distribution and are robust to the outliers and the heteroscedastic errors. Monte-Carlo simulation shows that the sign test is locally more powerful than the OLSE-based tests for heavy-tailed and/or heteroscedastic error distributions.