This paper develops an asymptotic theory for residual based tests for cointegration. These tests involve procedures that are designed to detect the presence of a unit root in the residuals of (cointegrating) regressions among the levels of economic time series. Attention is given to the augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test that is recommended by Engle-Granger (1987) and the Z(a) and Z(t) unit root tests recently proposed by Phillips (1987). TWo new tests are also introduced, one of which is invariant to the normalization of the cointegrating regression. All of these tests are shown to be asymptotically similar and simple representations of their limiting distributions are given in terms of standard Brownian motion. The ADF and Z(t) tests are ...