The sensitivity of the RESET tests to disturbance autocorrelation in regression analysis

This paper investigates the sensitivity of the RESET tests, proposed by Ramsey (1969) and modified by Thursby and Schmidt (1977), to disturbance autocorrelation in regression analysis. Porter and Kashyap (1984) show that RESET is not robust to autocorrelated disturbance when there is a highly autocorrelated regressor in the model. We show that RESET is sensitive to disturbance autocorrelation even when the regressors are not autocorrelated. We explain the findings of Thursby (1979) and Porter and Kashyap (1984) as well as our result by showing that a spurious correlation between the regressor and the disturbance is responsible for the serious size distortion of the RESET tests.