Economists have long known that timescale matters in that the structure of
decisions as
to the relevant time horizon, degree of time aggregation,
strength of relationship, and
even the relevant variables differ by timescale.
Unfortunately, until recently it was
difficult to decompose economic
time series into orthogonal timescale components
except for the short or
long run in which the former is dominated by noise. Wavelets are used
to produce an orthogonal decomposition of some economic variables by timescale
over six different timescales. The relationship of interest is that
between money and income, i.e., velocity. We confirm that timescale
decomposition is very important for analyzing economic relationships. The
analysis indicates the importance of
recognizing variations in phase between
variables when investigating the relationships between them and throws
considerable light on the conflicting results that have been obtained in the
literature using Granger causality tests.