Abstract:
It is remarkably easy to test for structural change, of the type that the classic F or "Chow" test is designed to detect, in a manner that is robust to heteroskedasticity of possibly unknown form. This paper first discusses how to test for structural change in nonlinear regression models by using a variant of the Gauss-Newton regression. It then shows how to make these tests robust to heteroskedasticity of unknown form and discusses several related procedures for doing so. Finally, it presents the results of a number of Monte Carlo experiments designed to see how well the new tests perform in finite samples.