Seasonal Adjustment of Economic Time Series and Multiple Regression Analysis Author(s): Michael C. Lovell Source: Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 58, No. 304 (Dec., 1963), pp. 993-1010 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the American Statistical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2283327 Accessed: 17-11-2017 18:43 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms American Statistical Association, Taylor & Francis, Ltd. are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Statistical Association This content downloaded from 128.97.55.206 on Fri, 17 Nov 2017 18:43:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms SEASONAL ADJUSTMENT OF ECONOMIC TIME SERIES AND MULTIPLE REGRESSION ANALYSIS' MICHAEL C. LOVELL Carnegie Institute of Technology The logical implications of certain simple consistency requirements for appraising alternative procedures for seasonal adjustment constitute the first problem considered in this paper. It is shown that any sum preserving technique of seasonal adjustment that satisfies the quite reasonable requirements of orthogonality and idempotency can be executed on the electronic computer by standard least squares regres- sion procedures. Problems involved in utilizing seasonally adjusted data when estimat- ing the parameters of econometric models are examined.