Time Series Analysis, Cointegration, and Applications

Abstract

The two prize winners in Economics this year would describe themselves as “Econometricians, ” so I thought that I should start by explaining that term. One can begin with the ancient subject of Mathematics which is largely concerned with the discovery of relationships between deterministic variables using a rigorous argument. (A deterministic variable is one whose value is known with certainty.) However, by the middle of the last millennium it became clear that some objects were not deterministic, they had to be described with the use of probabilities, so that Mathematics grew a substantial sub-field known as “Statistics. ” This later became involved with the analysis of data and a number of methods have been developed for data having what may be called “standard properties.” However, in some areas of application, the data that they generated were found to be not standard, and so special sub-sub-fields needed to be developed. For example, Biology produced Biometrics, Psychology gave us Psychometrics, and Economics produced Econometrics.