Near-unit-root persistence of symmetric and asymmetric stable autoregressive sequences

For an AR($1$) sequence with coefficient $0 < a < 1$, the probability of staying above zero decays exponentially in the number of steps; at the unit root $a=1$ it decays polynomially, with order $n^{-1/2}$ for symmetric increments. We study this transition for AR($1$) sequences driven by symmetric a