  Because of their tractability and their natural interpretations in term of
market quantities, Hawkes processes are nowadays widely used in high-frequency
finance. However, in practice, the statistical estimation results seem to show
that very often, only nearly unstable Hawkes processes are able to fit the data
properly. By nearly unstable, we mean that the $L^1$ norm of their kernel is
close to unity. We study in this work such processes for which the stability
condition is almost violated. Our main result states that after suitable
rescaling, they asymptotically behave like integrated Cox-Ingersoll-Ross
models. Thus, modeling financial order flows as nearly unstable Hawkes
processes may be a good way to reproduce both their high and low frequency
stylized facts. We then extend this result to the Hawkes-based price model
introduced by Bacry et al. [Quant. Finance 13 (2013) 65-77]. We show that under
a similar criticality condition, this process converges to a Heston model.
Again, we recover well-known stylized facts of prices, both at the
microstructure level and at the macroscopic scale.
