The genealogy of continuous-state branching processes with immigration

Recent works by J.F. Le Gall and Y. Le Jan [15] have extended the genealogical structure of Galton-Watson processes to continuous-state branching processes (CB). We are here interested in processes with immigration (CBI). The height process H which contains all the information about this genealogical structure is defined as a simple local time functional of a strong Markov process X ^*, called the genealogy-coding process (GCP). We first show its existence using It?’s synthesis theorem. We then give a pathwise construction of X ^* based on a Lévy process X with no negative jumps that does not drift to +∞ and whose Laplace exponent coincides with the branching mechanism, and an independent subordinator Y whose Laplace exponent coincides with the mechanism. We conclude the construction with proving that the local time process of H is a CBI-process. As an application, we derive the analogue of the classical Ray–Knight–Williams theorem for a general Lévy process with no negative jumps. Received: 28 January 2000 / Revised version: 5 February 2001 / Published online: 11 December 2001