Testing Weak Exogeneity in Cointegrated Panels

Abstract

For reasons of empirical tractability, analysis of cointegrated economic time series is often developed in a partial setting, in which a subset of variables is explictly modeled conditional on the rest. This approach yields valid inference only if the conditioning variables are weakly exogenous for the parameters of interest. This paper proposes a new test of weak exogeneity in panel cointegration models. The test has a limiting Gumbel distribution that is obtained by first letting T → ∞ and then letting N → ∞. We evaluate the accuracy of the asymptotic approximation in finite samples via simulation experiments. Finally, as an empirical illustration, we test weak exogeneity of disposable income and wealth in aggregate consumption.