Pooled Mean Group Estimation of the Bilateral Trade Balance Equation: USA vis-a-vis her Trading Partners

The autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL), even though it distinguishes between the short run and the long run effect, allows both the intercepts and slopes to vary across countries. Static panel estimations, such as fixed-effects estimation (FE), cannot distinguish between the short run and the long run behavior. To address the issue of short run heterogeneity as well as long run homogeneity of the estimated coefficients in a panel framework, the pooled mean group (PMG) estimator has gained popularity since 1999. In this paper, we estimate the bilateral trade balance model for the USA vis-a-vis her 19 OECD trading partners for the period 1973q1-2004q4 using the PMG estimator and find that PMG performs better than ARDL, FE, and MG estimators and provides significant and theoretically consistent results.