Inference on common trends in functional time series

Abstract

This paper studies statistical inference on unit roots and cointegration for time series in a Hilbert space. We develop statistical inference on the number of common stochastic trends that are embedded in the time series, i.e., the dimension of the nonstationary subspace. We also consider hypotheses on the nonstationary subspace itself. The Hilbert space can be of an arbitrarily large dimension, and our methods remain asymptotically valid even when the time series of interest takes values in a subspace of possibly unknown dimension. This has wide applicability in practice; for example, in the case of cointegrated vector time series of finite dimension, in a high-dimensional factor model that includes a finite number of nonstationary factors, in the case of cointegrated curve-valued (or function-valued) time series, and nonstationary dynamic functional factor models. We include two empirical illustrations to the term structure of interest rates and labor market indices, respectively.