Testing predictability is known to be an important issue for the balanced predictive regression model. Some unified testing statistics of desirable properties have been proposed, though their validity depends on a predefined assumption regarding whether or not an intercept term nevertheless exists. In fact, most financial data have endogenous or heteroscedasticity structure, and the existing intercept term test does not perform well in these cases. In this paper, we consider the testing for the intercept of the balanced predictive regression model. An empirical likelihood based testing statistic is developed, and its limit distribution is also derived under some mild conditions. We also provide some simulations and a real application to illustrate its merits in terms of both size and power properties.

A direct application of autoregressive (AR) models with independent and identically distributed (iid) errors is sometimes inadequate to fit the time series data well. A natural alternative is further to assume the model errors following an AR process, whose structure however has essential impacts on the statistical inferences related to the autoregressive models. In this paper, we construct a new unified test for checking the AR error structure based on the empirical likelihood method. The proposed test is desirable because its limit distribution is always chi-squared regardless of whether the autoregressive model is stationary or non-stationary, with or without an intercept term. Some simulations are also provided to illustrate the finite sample performance of this test. Finally, we apply the proposed test to a financial real data set.

Autoregressive exogenous, hereafter ARX, models are widely adopted in time series-related domains as they can be regarded as the combination of an autoregressive process and a predictive regression. Within a more complex structure, extant diagnostic checking methods face difficulties in remaining validity in many conditions existing in real applications, such as heteroscedasticity and error correlations exhibited between the ARX model itself and its exogenous processes. For these reasons, we propose a new serial correlation test method based on the profile empirical likelihood. Simulation results, as well as two real data examples, show that our method has a good performance in all mentioned conditions.