Munich Personal RePEc Archive Regime heteroskedasticity in Bitcoin: A comparison of Markov switching models Chappell, Daniel Birkbeck College, University of London 28 September 2018 Online at https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/90682/ MPRA Paper No. 90682, posted 24 Dec 2018 06:38 UTC Regime heteroskedasticity in Bitcoin: A comparison of Markov switching models Daniel R. Chappell Department of Economics, Mathematics and Statistics Birkbeck College, University of London
[email protected] 28th September 2018 Abstract Markov regime-switching (MRS) models, also known as hidden Markov models (HMM), are used extensively to account for regime heteroskedasticity within the returns of financial assets. However, we believe this paper to be one of the first to apply such methodology to the time series of cryptocurrencies. In light of Moln´arand Thies (2018) demonstrating that the price data of Bitcoin contained seven distinct volatility regimes, we will fit a sample of Bitcoin returns with six m-state MRS estimations, with m ∈ {2,..., 7}. Our aim is to identify the optimal number of states for modelling the regime heteroskedasticity in the price data of Bitcoin. Goodness-of-fit will be judged using three information criteria, namely: Bayesian (BIC); Hannan-Quinn (HQ); and Akaike (AIC). We determined that the restricted 5-state model generated the optimal estima- tion for the sample. In addition, we found evidence of volatility clustering, volatility jumps and asymmetric volatility transitions whilst also inferring the persistence of shocks in the price data of Bitcoin. Keywords Bitcoin; Markov regime-switching; regime heteroskedasticity; volatility transitions. 1 2 List of Tables Table 1. Summary statistics for Bitcoin (23rd April 2014 to 31st May 2018) .