Testing non-correlation and non-causality between multivariate arma time series

Haugh [Journal of the American Statistical Association (1976) Vol. 71, pp. 378–85] developed an approach to the problem of testing non-correlation (at all leads and lags) between two univariate time series. Haugh's tests however have low power against two series which are related over a long distributed lag when individual lag coefficients are relatively small. As a remedy, Koch and Yang [Journal of the American Statistical Association (1986) Vol. 8, pp. 533–44] proposed an alternative method that performs better than Haugh's under such dependencies. A multivariate extension of Haugh's procedure was proposed by El Himdi and Roy [The Canadian Journal of Statistics (1997) Vol. 25, pp. 233–56], but suffers the same weaknesses as the original univariate method. We develop here an asymptotic test generalizing Koch and Yang's method to the multivariate case. Our method includes El Himdi and Roy's as a special case. Based on the same idea, we also suggest a generalization of the El Himdi and Roy procedure for testing causality in the sense of Granger [Econometrica (1969) Vol. 37, pp. 424–38] between two multivariate series. A Monte Carlo study is conducted, which indicates that our approach performs better than El Himdi and Roy's for a wide range of models. Both procedures are applied to the problem of testing the absence of correlation between Canadian and US economic indicators, and to a brief study of causality between money and income in Canada.