Time-varying higher moments in Bitcoin.

Abstract

Cryptocurrencies represent a new and important class of investments but are associated with asymmetric distributions and extreme price changes. We use a modeling structure where higher-order moments (scale, skewness and kurtosis) are time-varying, and additionally we used nontraditional innovations distributions to study the return series of the most important cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. Based on the estimation of a series of Generalized Autoregressive Score (GAS) models, we compare predictive performance using a loss function based on Value at Risk performance.