Building upon the work of Chen et al. (2010), this paper proposes a test for sphericity of the variance–covariance matrix in a fixed effects panel data regression model without the normality assumption on the disturbances.

It is well known that the standard Breusch and Pagan (1980) LM test for cross-equation correlation in a SUR model is not appropriate for testing cross-sectional dependence in panel data models when the number of cross-sectional units (n) is large and the number of time periods (T) is small. In...

This paper proposes a test for sphericity in a fixed effects panel data model. It uses the Random Matrix Theory based approach of Ledoit and Wolf (2002) to test for sphericity of the error terms in a fixed effects panel model with a large number of cross-sectional units and time series...