We provide a methodology to disentangle the long-run relation between variables from their own dynamics. Macroeconomic and aggregate financial series have a high degree of inertia. If this persistence is not properly accounted for, spurious correlations will give rise to paradoxes. Our procedure...

An analytical formula is derived to approximate the finite sample bias of the ordinary least-squares (OLS) estimator of the autoregressive parameter when the underlying process has a unit root. It is found that the bias is expressible in terms of parabolic cylinder functions which are easy to...