Feller's test for explosions of stochastic Volterra equations

Abstract: This paper provides a Feller's test for explosions of one-dimensional continuous stochastic Volterra processes of convolution type. The study focuses on dynamics governed by nonsingular kernels, which preserve the semimartingale property of the processes and introduce memory features through a path-dependent drift. In contrast to the classical path-independent case, the sufficient condition derived in this study for a Volterra process to remain in the interior of an interval is generally more restrictive than the necessary condition. The results are illustrated with three specifications of the dynamics: the Volterra square-root diffusion, the Volterra Jacobi process and the Volterra power-type diffusion. For the Volterra square-root diffusion, also known as the Volterra CIR process, the paper presents a detailed discussion on the approximation of the singular fractional kernel with a sum of exponentials, a method commonly employed in the mathematical finance literature.