Skip to main content
Discussion Paper

Local Polynomial Whittle Estimation

The local Whittle (or Gaussian semiparametric) estimator of long range dependence, proposed by Künsch (1987) and analyzed by Robinson (1995a), has a relatively slow rate of convergence and a finite sample bias that can be large. In this paper, we generalize the local Whittle estimator to circumvent those problems. Instead of approximating the short-run component of the spectrum, φ(λ), by a constant in a shrinking neighborhood of frequency zero, we approximate its logarithm by a polynomial. This leads to a “local polynomial Whittle” (LPW) estimator.