%P 300 - 309 %I Elsevier %T Time evolution of stochastic processes with correlations in the variance: stability in power-law tails of distributions %L eprints1876 %A Boris Podobnik %A Kaushik Matia %A Alessandro Chessa %A Plamen Ch. Ivanov %A Youngki Lee %A H. Eugene Stanley %X We model the time series of the S&P500 index by a combined process, the AR+GARCH process, where {AR} denotes the autoregressive process which we use to account for the short-range correlations in the index changes and {GARCH} denotes the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic process which takes into account the long-range correlations in the variance. We study the AR+GARCH process with an initial distribution of truncated L?vy form. We find that this process generates a new probability distribution with a crossover from a L?vy stable power law to a power law with an exponent outside the L?vy range, beyond the truncation cutoff. We analyze the sum of n variables of the AR+GARCH process, and find that due to the correlations the AR+GARCH process generates a probability distribution which exhibits stable behavior in the tails for a broad range of values n?a feature which is observed in the probability distribution of the S&P500 index. We find that this power-law stability depends on the characteristic scale in the correlations. We also find that inclusion of short-range correlations through the {AR} process is needed to obtain convergence to a limiting Gaussian distribution for large n as observed in the data. %K Random walks; Stochastic processes; Fluctuation phenomena; Central limit theory %D 2001 %R 10.1016/S0378-4371(01)00390-9 %N 1?2 %V 300 %J Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications