An Alternative Estimation for Functional Coefficient ARCH-M Model ()
Received 4 June 2016; accepted 25 July 2016; published 28 July 2016

1. Introduction
ARCH-M model (Engle et al. [2] ) has been widely studied in last decades due to its various applications. Specially, ARCH-M model gives a way to study the relationship between return and the volatility in finance (for instances, see [3] [4] ). Let
denote the excess return of a market and
denote the corresponding conditional vola- tility at time t. A frequently applied conditional mean in ARCH-M models is
with
being an error term. The above equality gives a straightforward linear relationship between volatility and return: high volatility (risk) causes high return. The volatility coefficient
can be addressed as relative risk aversion para- meter in Das and Sarkar [5] and price of volatility in Chou et al. [6] . Many empirical studies have been done based on the above conditional mean. However, some researchers found
nonconstant and counter-cyclical [7] - [9] . To capture the variation of the volatility coefficient
, Chou et al. [6] studied a time-varying parameter GARCH-M. In their GARCH-M model, the volatility coefficient was assumed to follow a random walk, namely
with
being an error term.
Based on Chou et al. [6] , it makes sense to study the ARCH-M model with a time-varying volatility coefficient. Motivated by the functional coefficient model, Zhang et al. [1] consider a class of functional coefficient (G) ARCH-M models. For simplicity, we focus on the functional coefficient ARCH-M model of the form
(1)
Here
are observable series and
is independent of
for
.
is the unknown parameter vector and
is an unknown smooth function. All throughout
this article, the superscript
denotes the transpose of a vector or a matrix. In (1), the volatility coefficient is treated as some unknown smooth function
. The conditional variance
is assumed to be driven by a new-typed ARCH (p) process: the original
is replaced by the observable
. Similar to Chou et al. [6] , the modification for
is helpful to estimate the model. In fact, such a setting for the conditional variance in (1) is not new, Ling [10] , Ling [11] , Zhang et al. [12] and Xiong et al. [13] have taken advantage of such specifications for the conditional variance. Considering
in (1) as a measure of risk aversion as in Chou et al. [6] , the improvement of (1) lies in that it gives a way to understand how certain variable impacts the risk aversion.
For model (1), we need to estimate
and
based on the observable
. In
Zhang et al. [1] , the estimation procedures is as follows.
Firstly, given
, calculating
based on the second equation of model (1);
Next, getting the estimator
by functional coefficient regression technique based on the first equation of model (1), by treating
as observable variable;
Thirdly, calculating residuals
and acquiring
by minimizing
![]()
with respect to
, where
is a known weight function.
It is shown in Zhang et al. [1] that the above estimation is consistent. However, there is no concrete conver- gence rate. Moreover, it can be seen that in the above estimation,
depends on
and hence depends on
. However, there is no simple or explicite expression between them, which will make the calculation a bit time-consuming. In this article, a new simple estimator is given for model (1), which is shown to be consistent and convergence rate is also obtained.
The article is arranged as follows. In Section 2, we explain the idea about estimation approach. Section 3 lists the necessary assumptions to show the convergence results followed in Section 4. We conclude the paper in Section 5. Proofs of lemmas are put in the Appendix.
2. Estimation
For model (1), we need to estimate
and
based on the observable
. Denote
to be the probability density function of
. Let A be a compact subset of R with nonempty interior and satisfies
. For each
, based on (1) we have
(2)
where,
. Given
, define
(3)
Denote
to be the true value for
. Then,
according to (2) and (3). Let
and
be corresponding local linear estimators for
and
respectively (Fan and Yao [14] ). Then we can define a estimator for
as
(4)
For convenience of notation, we put
(5)
(6)
Further, define
(7)
(8)
(9)
where
is a nonnegative weight function whose compact support is contained in A. Then, in terms of (3) and (9), estimators for
and
are given as
(10)
In the above estimation procedure, we follow the ideas from Christensen et al. [15] and Yang [16] . When
,
in (8) becomes the commonly used log-likelihood function in the literature. However the direct minimizer of
with respect to
is not practical because the quantity
in
depends on the unknown function
. Note that
in (9) can be considered as an approximation to
. Consequently, to obtain a feasible estimator for
, we switch to minimize
. For practical minimization in (10), one can refer the algorithm given by Christensen et al. [15] .
Remark 1. From (4), it can be seen that there is a simple specification between
and
. Such a simple explicite expression will greatly improve computational efficiency compared to the method in Zhang et al. [1] .
3. Assumptions
The following assumptions will be adopted to show some asymptotic results. Throughout this paper, we let
denote certain positive constants, which may take different values at different places.
Assumption 1. The kernel function
is a bounded density with a bounded support ![]()
Assumption 2. The process
has a continuous pdf
satisfying
, where A is a compact subset of R with nonempty interior. Further, there are constants m and M such that
for
.
Assumption 3. The considered parameter space
is a bounded metric space. The process
from (1) is strictly stationary and ergodic.
Assumption 4.
holds uniformly for
,
, where ![]()
Assumption 5. The function
defined in (7) has an unique minimum point at
.
Assumption 6.
defined in (2) satisfy
uniformly for
. The corresponding estimators suffice
,
, where
is the bandwidth such that
and for some
![]()
and ![]()
Remark 2. Assumptions 1 - 3 are frequently adopted in the literature. Assumptions 4 - 5 have been analogously adopted by Yang [16] . In Assumption 6, the boundness is regular. When the bandwidth
suffices the described conditions and the processes
satisfies certain mixing conditions, the uniform convergence holds for local linear regression method (Fan and Yao [14] , Theorem 6.5).
4. Asymptotic Results
Theorem 1. Suppose that Assumptions 1 - 6 hold. Then for any ![]()
![]()
Theorem 1 shows our estimators are consistent. The following Theorem 2 further gives certain convergence rate.
Theorem 2. Suppose that Assumptions 1 - 6 hold. Then for any ![]()
![]()
In order to prove Theorem 1 and 2, we need the following lemmas whose proofs can be found in the Appendix.
Lemma 1. For
and
given in (3) and (4), suppose that Assumptions 1 - 6 hold. Then for
![]()
(11)
Lemma 2. For
and
given in (8) and (9), suppose Assumptions 1 - 6 hold. Then for ![]()
(12)
Proof of Theorem 1. From (7)-(8), it is not difficult to get
(13)
Here, for each
takes value between
and
. Similar to (A.18), when
, it can be shown
(14)
holds for certain finite M. Put
(15)
According to (A.18) and (A.19), (13)-(15), for certain M, it follows
(16)
Note
is independent of
and
Then similar to (A.22), it can be shown that
, implying
. Applying Lemma 1 and Theorem 1 in Andrews [17] to
, then it follows that
(17)
(12) and (17) give
(18)
which implies the consistency of
in (10) by Lemma 14.3 (page 258) and Theorem 2.12 (page 28) in Kosorok [18] . In addition,
![]()
where
is between
and
.
Proof of Theorem 2. According to (10) and (12), it follows
![]()
(19)
where,
(20)
From Theorem 1 and Lemmas 1 - 2,
(21)
In the above second equality, the first
is from the consistency of
. Put
![]()
![]()
From (A.9),
(22)
By the martingale central limit theorem (see, for example, Theorem 35.12 in Billingsley [19] ), it is not difficulty to show
(23)
According to (19)-(23), it follows that
(24)
Moreover,
(25)
Conjecture. According to (19)-(25), if one can show
, then we can state the following asymp- totic normality:
![]()
![]()
where ![]()
5. Conclusions
In this paper, a new approach is proposed to estimate the functional coefficient ARCH-M model. The proposed estimators are more efficient and, under regularity conditions, they are shown to be consistent. Certain convergence rate is also given.
Besides that the proof of conjecture in Section 4 needs further development, it is meaningful to further consider a GARCH type conditional variance in model (1). However, such an improvement is not trivial because the estimation method adopted in this paper can not be applied to the GARCH case. An alternative approach needs further development.
Acknowledgements
We thank the Editor and the referee for their comments. Research of X. Zhang and Q. Xiong is funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11401123, 11271095) and the Foundation for Fostering the Scientific and Technical Innovation of Guangzhou University. These supports are greatly appreciated.
Appendix
Proof of Lemma 1
Proof. We only show the case of
. Other situations can be proved by similar argument. Let
and
. Then
can be written as
,
can be
written as
Noting, for
,
equals 1 when
, and 0 for
other cases. Then it is easy to have
(A.1)
Hence,
(A.2)
According to Assumption.6, it is easy to obtain the following equalities:
![]()
(A.3)
Note that
and
implying
. Then Equation (11) follows from (A.2)-(A.3).
Proof of Lemma 2
Proof. We only consider the case of
, other cases can be obtained with similar and easier arguments. From (5)-(6),
(A.4)
Further,
(A.5)
Let
(A.6)
Then,
(A.7)
We can further have
(A.8)
(A.9)
From (A.9),
can be easily obtained by replacing
with
. Then
(A.10)
Here,
(A.11)
(A.12)
(A.13)
(A.14)
(A.15)
. (A.16)
Note
because of
Hence to show (12), it suffices to prove
To save space, we only give detailed proof of
It is easy to have
![]()
In terms of (A.4)-(A.5),
can be written as
(A.17)
Without loss of generality, there exists a
such that
According to (5), Assumptions 2 and 5, when
,
(A.18)
The last inequality comes from the fact
is uniformly bounded for
. Similarly, when
we can show
(A.19)
From Lemma 1, it follows that
(A.20)
(A.17)-(A.20) gives
(A.21)
Note that
is independent of
and
. Based on Assumption 3, we have
(A.22)
(A.20)-(A.22) implies
.
![]()
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NOTES
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*Corresponding author.