Yule (1926) introduced the concept of spurious or nonsense correlation, and showed by simulation that for some nonstationary processes, that the empirical correlations seem not to converge in probability even if the processes were inde- pendent. This was later discussed by Granger and Newbold (1974), and Phillips (1986) found the limit distributions. We propose to distinguish between empirical and population correlation coefficients and show in a bivariate autoregressive model for nonstationary variables that the empirical correlation and regression coe¢ cients do not converge to the relevant population values, due to the trending nature of the data. We conclude by giving a simple cointegration analysis of two interests. The analysis illustrates that much more insight can be gained about the dynamic behavior of the nonstationary variables then simply by calculating a correlation coefficient.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by School of Economics and Management, University of Aarhus in its series CREATES Research Papers with number
2007-35.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: