In this article, we aim to provide a detailed econometric analysis of the realized volatility in international stock markets of Brazil, China, Europe, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which represent a mix of large developing, and developed markets. For our purpose, we use the functional data analysis (FDA) framework, whence discrete volatility data were first transformed into continuous functions, and thereafter, derivatives of the continuous functions were investigated, and kinetic and potential energy associated is the volatility system were extracted. Results revealed that COVID-19 indeed had a significant effect on international financial market volatility for all the countries, with the exception of China. The realized volatility of the international financial markets did return to their pre-COVID levels in May 2020, and this recovery time was significantly faster than the 2008 financial crisis recovery period. Within the FDA framework, we further investigated the role of uncertainty on the realized volatility, specifically from an outbreak of an infectious disease (such as COVID-19) and a daily newspaper-based infectious disease index as the predictor. The regression analysis showed that the volatility of financial markets can be accurately modeled by this infectious disease index, but only for periods experiencing an epidemic or pandemic.
Accelerated degradation tests (ADTs) are widely used for assessing the reliability of long-life products. During an ADT, accelerated stresses not only expedite the degradation of test products but also increase the likelihood of encountering traumatic shocks. Moreover, it is important to acknowledge that measurement errors can be inevitable during the observation process of an ADT. Unfortunately, these errors are often overlooked in the optimal design of the ADT, especially when multiple competing failure modes are present. In this article, we propose a new approach to design ADTs when measurement errors exist and test products suffer from degradation failures and random shock failures. We utilize the Wiener process to model the degradation path, incorporating normally distributed measurement errors, and an exponential distribution to fit the time between random shock failures. Given the number of test products and the termination time, we optimize the ADT plans under three common design criteria. The equivalence theorem is used to verify the optimality of the optimal ADT plans. A real-life example and sensitivity analysis are provided to illustrate our proposed method. The results demonstrate that when competing failure modes are present, the optimal ADT plans, which account for measurement errors, differ significantly from those that do not consider such errors.