THE DURBIN-WATSON TEST FOR SERIAL CORRELATION WITH EXTREME SAMPLE SIZES OR MANY REGRESSORS'

Recent studies by Durbin and Watson [5], L'Esperance and Taylor [10], Koerts and Abrahamse [8], Tillman [15], Vinod [16], Savin and White [14] and others have shown increasing interest in the test of autocorrelation based on the d statistic proposed by Durbin and Watson [3 and 4]. The focus of these papers has been the computation of the exact distribution of d and the power of the test based on d. The exact distribution of d has been developed by Imhof [7] and Pan Jie-Jian [12]. However, few of the generally available computer programs for regression analysis incorporate these methods,2 possibly because of computational costs, particularly for large samples. With the Durbin and Watson [4] tables the bounds test is restricted to time series regressions with 15 to 100 observations and a maximum of 5 regressors in addition to unity. Often regression studies do not meet these restrictions since samples with less than 15 observations commonly occur with annual time series and regressions with more than 5 regressors are often found in the context of simultaneous equations and of distributed lags.3 In this paper we present extended tables for the bounds test. Our tables can be used for samples with 6 to 200 observations and for as many as 20 regressors.