Testing the eigenvalue structure of spot and integrated covariance

Abstract

For vector Itô semimartingale dynamics, we derive the asymptotic distributions of likelihood-ratio-type test statistics for the purpose of identifying the eigenvalue structure of both integrated and spot covariance matrices estimated using high-frequency data. Unlike the existing approaches where the cross-section dimension grows to infinity, our tests do not necessarily require large cross-section and thus allow for a wide range of applications. The tests, however, are based on non-standard asymptotic distributions with many nuisance parameters. Another contribution of this paper consists in proposing a bootstrap method to approximate these asymptotic distributions. While standard bootstrap methods focus on sampling point-wise returns, the proposed method replicates features of the asymptotic approximation of the statistics of interest that guarantee its validity. A Monte Carlo simulation study shows that the bootstrap-based test controls size and has power for even moderate size samples.