Feller’s test for explosions of stochastic Volterra equations

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. This gap between necessary and sufficient conditions is also present in the case of a sum-of-exponentials kernel, where this work provides alternative Khasminskii-type criteria for explosion based on multi-dimensional Itô diffusions of independent interest. 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.