A student from Cuba asked me:
"I want to apply the DOLS methodology... I have read several books and research works about DOLS but none of them explain clearly how to test cointegration in this case.... I asked some professors about this issue and one of them told me that I should apply the Johansen cointegration test."
It's quite easy to find papers that do this - first test for cointegration using the Johansen procedure, report only the cointegration test statistics, and if they can be used to reject the null hypothesis of non-cointegration then use some other method such as Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares (DOLS) to estimate a static single equation regression model. These researchers aren't actually interested in the complete vector autoregression (VAR) system, which is OK. I've reviewed quite a lot of papers that use this approach.
If your model has more than two variables (one dependent variable and one explanatory variable) then this is a very bad idea. The cointegration test statistics from the Johansen procedure (if they reject the null) say nothing about the cointegration properties of your single equation regression model.
The following simple example shows why. Imagine we have three variables, X1, X2, and X3 with the following "data generation process":
where epsilon 1 is a stationary stochastic process and epsilon 2 and 3 are simply white noise. Variables X2 and X3 follow simple random walks. Variable X1 cointegrates with X2. But X3 is a random walk that has nothing to do with the other two variables. If you estimate a VAR with these variables and do the Johansen cointegration test, you should expect to find that there is one cointegrating vector. But the following regression:
will not cointegrate. It is a spurious regression because it includes X3 which is an unrelated random walk. We cannot rely on finding that the VAR "cointegrates" to assume that this regression also cointegrates. Only X1 and X2 cointegrate in this example. Of course, it is possible that X1, X2, and X3 are jointly cointegrated but as this example shows, that doesn't have to be the case.
How can we avoid this? The cointegrating vector in this case is [1, -beta1]. We could test within the Johansen procedure whether we can restrict the cointegrating vector to not include a coefficient for X3. Unlike gamma3 in the static regression, if X3 does not belong in the cointegrating relationship, then this coefficient is expected to be zero. We can and should also test the residuals of the static regression to see if they cointegrate.
"I want to apply the DOLS methodology... I have read several books and research works about DOLS but none of them explain clearly how to test cointegration in this case.... I asked some professors about this issue and one of them told me that I should apply the Johansen cointegration test."
It's quite easy to find papers that do this - first test for cointegration using the Johansen procedure, report only the cointegration test statistics, and if they can be used to reject the null hypothesis of non-cointegration then use some other method such as Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares (DOLS) to estimate a static single equation regression model. These researchers aren't actually interested in the complete vector autoregression (VAR) system, which is OK. I've reviewed quite a lot of papers that use this approach.
If your model has more than two variables (one dependent variable and one explanatory variable) then this is a very bad idea. The cointegration test statistics from the Johansen procedure (if they reject the null) say nothing about the cointegration properties of your single equation regression model.
The following simple example shows why. Imagine we have three variables, X1, X2, and X3 with the following "data generation process":
where epsilon 1 is a stationary stochastic process and epsilon 2 and 3 are simply white noise. Variables X2 and X3 follow simple random walks. Variable X1 cointegrates with X2. But X3 is a random walk that has nothing to do with the other two variables. If you estimate a VAR with these variables and do the Johansen cointegration test, you should expect to find that there is one cointegrating vector. But the following regression:
will not cointegrate. It is a spurious regression because it includes X3 which is an unrelated random walk. We cannot rely on finding that the VAR "cointegrates" to assume that this regression also cointegrates. Only X1 and X2 cointegrate in this example. Of course, it is possible that X1, X2, and X3 are jointly cointegrated but as this example shows, that doesn't have to be the case.
How can we avoid this? The cointegrating vector in this case is [1, -beta1]. We could test within the Johansen procedure whether we can restrict the cointegrating vector to not include a coefficient for X3. Unlike gamma3 in the static regression, if X3 does not belong in the cointegrating relationship, then this coefficient is expected to be zero. We can and should also test the residuals of the static regression to see if they cointegrate.
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