Testing for ARCHin the Presence of Additive

In this paper we investigate the properties of the Lagrange Multiplier (LM) test for autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH) and generalized ARCH (GARCH) in the presence of additive outliers (AO's). We show analytically that both the asymptotic size and power are adversely aaected if AO's are neglected: the test rejects the null hypothesis of homoskedasticity too often when it is in fact true, while the test has diiculty detecting genuine GARCH eeects. Several Monte Carlo experiments show that these phenomena occur in small samples as well. We design and implement a robust test, which has better size and power properties than the conventional test in the presence of AO's. Applications to the French industrial production series and weekly returns of the Spanish peseta/US dollar exchange rate reveal that, sometimes, apparent GARCH eeects may be due to only a small number of outliers and, conversely, that genuine GARCH eeects can be masked by outliers.