Spurious Regression

The spurious regression phenomenon in Least Squares occurs for a wide range of Data Generating Processes, such as driftless unit roots, unit roots with drift, long memory, trend and broken-trend stationarity. Indeed, spurious regressions have played a fundamental role in the building of modern time series econometrics and have revolutionized many of the procedures used in applied macroeconomics. Spin-offs from this research range from unit-root tests to cointegration and error-correction models. This paper provides an overview of results about spurious regression, pulled from disperse sources, and explains their implications.