Threshold Autoregressive Models in Finance: A Comparative Approach

Financial instruments are known to exhibit abrupt and dramatic changes in behaviour. This paper investigates the relative efficacy of two-regime threshold autoregressive (TAR) models and smooth threshold autoregressive (STAR) models, applied successfully to econometric dynamics, in the finance domain. The nature of this class of models is explored in relation to the conventional linear modeling approach, with reference to simulated data and real stock return indices.