Structural Change Analysis of Active Cryptocurrency Market

Abstract

Motivated by the large frequent price fluctuation and excessive volatility observed in the cryptocurrency market, this study adopts Bai and Perron’s structural change model by incorporating the trading volume and autoregressive variables to examine the number and location of change points in daily closing price, return and volatility proxied by the squared return of Cryptocurrency Index, Cryptocurrency Index 30, and the top 10 cryptocurrencies ranked according to market capitalisation. Results show that the structural changes occur very frequently for the price series, followed by squared return and return series which were consistently observed between December 2017 to April 2018. In addition, the results also reveal that the two cryptocurrency indices may not be beneficial as an indicator to reflect the whole cryptocurrency market for the entire studied period as these two indices do not display consistent structural change in contrast to the top 10 cryptocurrencies that might have significant implications for modelling the cryptocurrency data.