EViews offers powerful time-saving tools for estimating and examining the properties of Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) models. ARDLs are standard least squares regressions that include lags of both the dependent variable and explanatory variables as regressors (Greene, 2008). Although ARDL models have been used in econometrics for decades, they have gained popularity in recent years as a method of examining cointegrating relationships between variables through the work of Pesaran and Shin (1998, PS(1998)) and Pesaran, Shin and Smith (2001, PSS(2001)).

While it is possible to use a standard least squares procedure to estimate an ARDL, the specialized ARDL estimator in EViews offers a number of useful features including model selection and the computation of post-estimation diagnostics.