Asymptotic error distribution for the Euler scheme with locally Lipschitz coefficients

Abstract: In traditional work on numerical schemes for solving stochastic differential equations (SDEs), it is usually assumed that the coefficients are globally Lipschitz. This assumption has been used to establish a powerful analysis of the numerical approximations of the solutions of stochastic differential equations. In practice, however, the globally Lipschitz assumption on the coefficients is on occasion too stringent a requirement to meet. Some Brownian motion driven SDEs used in applications have coefficients that are Lipschitz only on compact sets. Reflecting the importance of the locally Lipschitz case, it has been well studied in recent years, yet some simple to state, fundamental results remain unproved. We attempt to fill these gaps in this paper, establishing both a rate of convergence, but also we find the asymptotic normalized error process of the error process arising from a sequence of approximations. The result is analogous to the original result of this type, established in KT1991-2 back in 1991. This result was improved in 1998 in JJ1998, and recently(2009) it was partially extended in AN. As we indicate, the results in our paper provide the basis of a statistical analysis of the error; in this spirit we give conditions for a finite variance.