On the Empirical Importance of Periodicity in the Volatility of Financial Returns - Time Varying GARCH as a Second Order APC(2) Process

We discuss the empirical importance of long term cyclical effects in the volatility of financial returns. Following Amado and Terasvirta (2009), Cizek and Spokoiny (2009) and others, we consider a general conditionally heteroscedastic process with stationarity property distorted by a deterministic function that governs the possible time variability of the unconditional variance. The function proposed in this paper can be interpreted as a finite Fourier approximation of an Almost Periodic (AP) function as defined by Corduneanu (1989). The resulting model has a particular form of a GARCH process with time varying parameters, intensively discussed in the recent literature. In the empirical analyses we apply a generalisation of the Bayesian AR(1)-GARCH model for daily returns of S&P500, covering the period of sixty years of US postwar economy, including the recently observed global financial crisis. The results of a formal Bayesian model comparison clearly indicate the existence of significant long term cyclical patterns in volatility with a strongly supported periodic component corresponding to a 14 year cycle. Our main results are invariant with respect to the changes of the conditional distribution from Normal to Student-t and to the changes of the volatility equation from regular GARCH to the Asymmetric GARCH.