Scand. J. of Economics 106(2), 187–213, 2004 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9442.2004.00361.x The Nobel Memorial Prize for Clive W. J. Granger David F. Hendry* Oxford University, Oxford OX1 1NF, England [email protected] I. Introduction Clive Granger developed the econometric foundations for analysing and model- ling non-stationary macroeconomic time series, forging an approach that has become the dominant paradigm in empirical macroeconomic research. Based on a critique of potential ‘‘nonsense regressions’’ in applied econometric models of non-stationary data, Granger’s concept of cointegration facilitated the merging in a unified framework of economic theory about equilibrium relationships with dynamic econometric models of short-run behaviour. This provided a remark- able leap forward in the empirical analysis of macroeconomic relationships, and in testing macroeconomic theories, extending to non-stationary macroeconomic time series the formulation by Nobel Laureate Trygve Haavelmo of an economy as a system of simultaneous stochastic relationships. Major policy institutions around the world on a day-to-day basis now use empirical econometric models in which cointegrated relations determine the long-run outcomes. His research has spawned an industry, veritably ‘‘opening a door’’ to powerful ideas and procedures that many have followed, and helped to extend, ever since. There are in excess of 2,800 citations to his joint paper on cointegration with Robert Engle, who shared the 2003 Prize. In recognition of his achievements in developing methods of analysing economic time series with common trends (cointegration), Clive Granger was awarded The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel in October 2003. This article is a complement to Frank Diebold’s fine appreciation of Engle’s contributions, where volatility and ‘‘factor’’ models, including common trends, are addressed. * Prepared at the invitation of the Scandinavian Journal of Economics. Financial support from the UK Economic and Social Research Council under a Professional Research Fellowship, RES 015 270035, is gratefully acknowledged. I am indebted to Timo Tera¨svirta for his invaluable inputs to the paper, and to Gunner Ba˚rdsen, Mike Clements, James Davidson, Jesus Gonzalo, Eilev Jansen, Søren Johansen, Katarina Juselius, Michael Massmann, Grayham Mizon, John Muellbauer, Bent Nielsen, Ragnar Nymoen, Peter Phillips, Duo Qin, Neil Shephard and Ken Wallis for helpful comments on an earlier draft. # The editors of the Scandinavian Journal of Economics 2004. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 188 D. F. Hendry The first really influential research of Clive Granger, building on his contributions to spectral analysis, was his formalization of causality (via predictability), which made that concept operational, and thus testable. Most economic relations are inexact, so stochastic formulations are inevitable, leading to his idea of evaluating causality in terms of changes to the joint distributions of the observables. Granger (1969) is one of the most influential papers in econometrics, and has been cited on more than 1,200 occasions. A vast literature has also followed this path-breaking work. ‘‘Granger- causality’’ provided macroeconomics with empirical tests of economic theories that implied time-related causal relationships between economic variables, a possibility that has been implemented many times over during the last 30 years. At about the same time, Granger helped advance the theory of economic forecasting in a series of major publications. In particular, Bates and Granger (1969) proposed a simple but powerful idea, namely that pooled forecasts might dominate the best of a set of separate forecasts. Finally, Granger has made important contributions to financial econometrics, one of the most rapidly growing fields in economics. His related work on long memory, non-linearity, commodities, aggregation and stock market behaviour, much of which is still continuing, has shaped the research agenda of many financial econometricians, and given rise to a large number of applications. A list of his publications (as of its appearance) is provided in his interview with Phillips (1997), and a complete set is available on his web site (http://econ.ucsd.edu/cgranger/). The volume edited by Ghysels, Swanson and Watson (2001) contains reprints of many of his published papers. This article is a personal perspective on Clive’s work and discusses his most important contributions to economics, focusing on cointegration. The story of the discovery of cointegration, like many scientific discoveries, is a fascinating tale involving false avenues, half-understood solutions, partial insights and persistent anomalies, all finally resolved by Granger’s major breakthrough. It actually began in the last part of the nineteenth century, with an effort to understand why ‘‘peculiar’’ correlations (such as the apocryphal positive association between the number of births and storks in Stockholm) turned up surprisingly often. The key steps forward are addressed in Section II. Then the story progresses to the role of equilibria in non-stationary time series (where some aspects of the distribution change over time), considered in Section III. The saga concludes with Granger’s general formulation for the widely occurring phenomenon of cointegration in economics, described in Section IV. The remainder of the article then briefly considers Granger’s other major contributions, including those to spectral analysis in economics in Section V; causality in Section VI; long memory in Section VII; non-linear modelling in Section VIII; and economic forecasting in Section IX. Section X concludes. # The editors of the Scandinavian Journal of Economics 2004. The Nobel Memorial Prize for Clive W. J. Granger 189 II. Nonsense Regressions The first statistician to formally analyse, and name, nonsense regressions was Udny Yule (1926). He established the misbehaviour of the conventional correlation coefficient when the two variables under study were integrated, either once (now denoted I(1)), or twice (I(2)). Consider a homoscedastic, random variable t independently drawn from a normal distribution with 2 mean zero and variance , then yt and st are, respectively, I(1) and I(2) if: Xt Xt yt ¼ i and st ¼ yj: i¼0 j¼0 Yule showed that the null of no relation would be rejected most of the time in the setting of such integrated variables, even though the series were independently generated. Notice that Áyt ¼ yt À ytÀ1 ¼ t and Ást ¼ yt so 2 Á st ¼ t, and hence differencing once or twice, respectively, reduces these two constructed series to a non-integrated form (naturally denoted I(0)) to which standard inference procedures could be applied. However, worries about analysing ‘‘trending’’ variables were not new: for example, Yule (1897) had previously discussed ‘‘spurious’’ correlations where two vari- ables were apparently related, but only because each was related to a third. That research was the source of Maynard Keynes’s (1940) famous quote in reviewing Jan Tinbergen (1940) about the ‘‘mine [Mr Yule] sprang under the contraptions of optimistic statisticians’’. Shortly after Yule (1897), Hooker (1901) successfully discriminated aspects of the correlation between marriage rates and ‘‘trade’’ due to trend effects and those due to ‘‘oscillations’’, as well as considering the impact of regime shifts. Thus, more than a century ago, there was a developing insight into non-stationarity in economic data; see Morgan (1990) and Qin (1993) for histories of econometrics. By the early 1970s, large econometric models often produced less accu- rate forecasts than simple time-series models which had been built without any reference to economic theory; see e.g., Cooper (1972) and Nelson (1972). The specifications of the equations in these large simultaneous models were not very dynamic, and contained few lagged endogenous variables. Working with Paul Newbold, Granger and Newbold (1974) observed that all too often, the main criteria for selecting each equation by economic modellers was their goodness-of-fit (measured by the value of R2, the squared coefficient of determination), and the signs and ‘‘significances’’ of regression estimates. From this starting-point, Granger re-investigated the problem of ‘‘nonsense regressions’’ (but called ‘‘spurious regressions’’). Con- sider a data generation process (DGP) for two independent non-stationary variables (yt and xt say), each a random walk of the form: # The editors of the Scandinavian Journal of Economics 2004. 190 D. F. Hendry 2 yt ytÀ1 t t 0 0 ¼ þ where IN2 ; 2 ; ð1Þ xt xtÀ1 t t 0 0 where IN2[0, Æ] denotes a bivariate mean-zero, constant variance Æ, normally distributed innovation error. Thus, yt and xt in (1) are independent I(1) variables whose first differences Áyt and Á xt are I(0) (in fact, stationary white noise). Regress either variable on the other, as in: yt ¼ þ xt þ ut: ð2Þ Then the regression coefficient usually appears significant, in that the null hypothesis, H0: ¼ 0 (i.e., that the coefficient is zero) is rejected about 70% of the time when a conventionally calculated t-test is applied at 5% for a sample size of about T ¼ 100. Thus, the danger of accepting such purely spurious equations as meaningful economic relationships is considerable. Surprisingly, the problem of spurious rejection gets worse as the sample size grows: at T ¼ 1,000, H0: ¼ 0 is incorrectly