More powerful cointegration tests with non-normal errors

In this paper, we suggest new cointegration tests that can become more powerful in the presence of non-normal errors. Non-normal errors will not pose a problem in usual cointegration tests even when they are ignored. However, we show that they can become useful sources to improve the power of the tests when we use the “residual augmented least squares” (RALS) procedure to make use of nonlinear moment conditions driven by non-normal errors. The suggested testing procedure is easy to implement and it does not require any non-linear estimation techniques. We can exploit the information on the non-normal error distribution that is already available but ignored in the usual cointegration tests. Our simulation results show significant power gains over existing cointegration tests in the presence of non-normal errors.