Calculating the Distribution of the Serial Correlation Estimator by Saddlepoint Integration

The efficient method of numerical saddlepoint integration is described and applied to calculating the probability distribution of the maximum likelihood and Yule-Walker estimators of the correlation coefficient a of a first-order autoregressive normal time series with initial value either zero or nonzero when a finite number n of data are at hand. Stationary time series of the same type are also treated. Significance points are computed in a number of examples to show how, as n increases, the finite-sample distributions approach the asymptotic distributions that have appeared in the literature.