Retail sales: persistence in the short-term and long-term dynamics

The management of retail sales is of paramount importance for retail organizations and retail policy-makers. This study examines the degrees of persistence and seasonality of various retail sectors using innovative seasonal and non-seasonal fractional integration and auto-regressive models. Adapting data from both the Australian and the US retail sectors, the results indicate that the impacts of seasonality and persistence are not consistent across the various retail sectors. It is also clear that retail sales forecasts are better explained in terms of a long memory model that incorporates both persistence and seasonal components.