NONLINEARITY AND TEMPORAL DEPENDENCE By

Nonlinearities in the drift and diffusion coefficients influence temporal dependence in scalar diffusion models. We study this link using two notions of temporal dependence: β − mixing and ρ − mixing. We show that β − mixing and ρ − mixing with exponential decay are essentially equivalent concepts for scalar diffusions. For stationary diffusions that fail to be ρ−mixing, we show that they are still β−mixing except that the decay rates are slower than exponential. For such processes we find transformations of the Markov states that have finite variances but infinite spectral densities at frequency zero. Some have spectral densities that diverge at frequency zero in a manner similar to that of stochastic processes with long memory. Finally we show how nonlinear, state-dependent, Poisson sampling alters the unconditional distribution as well as the temporal dependence. JEL classification: C12; C13; C22; C50