A sieve bootstrap test for stationarity

This paper proposes a bootstrap test for testing the null hypothesis that a time series is stationary against the alternative hypothesis that it is integrated of order one. Our approach makes use of a sieve bootstrap scheme based on residual resampling from autoregressive approximations the order of which increases with the sample size at a suitable rate. The first-order asymptotic correctness of the sieve bootstrap for testing the stationarity hypothesis is established for a subclass of linear processes. The small-sample properties of the method are also investigated by means of Monte Carlo experiments. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.