A note on geometric ergodicity of autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (ARCH) model

For the pth-order linear ARCH model,

, where ₀ > 0, _i 0, I = 1, 2, …, p, {_t} is an i.i.d. normal white noise with E_t = 0, E_t² = 1, and _t is independent of {X_s, s < t}, Engle (1982) obtained the necessary and sufficient condition for the second-order stationarity, that is, ₁ + ₂ + ··· + _p < 1. In this note, we assume that _t has the probability density function p(t) which is positive and lower-semicontinuous over the real line, but not necessarily Gaussian, then the geometric ergodicity of the ARCH(p) process is proved under E_t² = 1. When _t has only the first-order absolute moment, a sufficient condition for the geometric ergodicity is also given.