Long memory in REIT volatility revisited: genuine or spurious, and self-similar?

This paper revisits the Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) long-memory literature and addresses two important research questions: one, whether the observed long memory in REIT volatility is genuine or spurious (that is, caused by structural changes); and, two, a related one - whether the long memory is self-similar. Regarding the first question, we find strong evidence for the coexistence of pure long memory and structural breaks in all developed countries under study when daily data are used. But for the emerging markets under study some show coexistence while others show only pure long memory. Such a finding is also shared by both developed and emerging markets when it comes to using lower frequency data (weekly and monthly). As for the second question, we find support for self-similarity when we compare the daily and weekly long-memory estimates for the developed markets, implying that long memory is an intrinsic feature of the data. However, the support is not strong enough to completely rule out the possibility of structural breaks. Moreover, the support is found reduced when we consider the emerging markets and the monthly estimates from the developed markets. This is possibly due to the small sample size in both cases. Overall our findings have important implications for volatility modeling and forecasting.