Large sample tests of independence for absolutely continuous bivariate exponential distribution

This paper obtains a test based on MLE Of λ3 for testing the parameter λ3=0 in the absolutely continuous bivariate exponential distribution formulated by Block and Basu(1974) which is a modification of Marshall and 01kin(1967) model. The hypothesis λ3=0 is equivalent to independence of the two components. The asymptotic distribution of MLE which is univariate normal is used to construct the test. We compare the power of the above test with likelihood ratio test(LRT) given by Gupta, Mehrotra and Michalek(1984) and in the simulated study we observe that for large samples the test based on MLE has much better power performance.