Testing for an irrelevant regressor in a simple cointegration analysis

Abstract

This paper investigates the asymptotic behavior of the t-ratio associated to an irrelevant variable in a three-variable cointegration analysis. It is proved that the t-ratio converges to a non-standard distribution suitable for statistical inference. Although the test-statistic is not pivotal when the innovations are serially correlated, Monte Carlo evidence suggests that the size distortion can be considerably mitigated by means of HAC standard errors.Irrelevant variables, cointegration, t-ratio, statistical inference