Moment redundancy test with application to efficiency-improving copulas

Moment redundancy as defined by Breusch et al. (1999) is a testable hypothesis. We propose a simple test of the hypothesis in the context of copula-based pseudo-maximum likelihood estimation considered by Prokhorov and Schmidt (2009b). A robust and efficiency-improving parametric copula permits sizable improvement in precision at no cost in terms of bias and the proposed test can be used to select such copulas.