Long-Memory and Level Shifts in the Volatility of Stock Market Return Indices

There has been interest in the possibility of confusing long memory and structural changes in level, and studies showed that when a short-memory process is contaminated by level shifts the estimate of the fractional differencing parameter is biased upward and the autocovariances decay slowly. We analyze the properties of the autocorrelation function, the periodogram, and the log periodogram estimate of the memory parameter when the level shift...