In business cycle research, smoothing data is an essential step in that it can influence the extent to which model-generated moments stand up to their empirical counterparts. To demonstrate this idea, we compare the results of McDermott’s (1997) modified HP-filter with the conventional...

I generate priors for a VAR from four competing models of economic fluctuations: a standard RBC model, Fisher’s (2006) investment-specific technology shocks model, an RBC model with capital adjustment costs and habit formation, and a sticky price model with an unaccommodating monetary...

There is comparatively little empirical evidence regarding the impacts of cross border business cycle fluctuations on metropolitan housing markets located near international boundaries. This study examines the impacts of economic conditions in Mexico on sales of existing single-family houses in...

This paper estimates and forecasts U.S. business cycle turning points with state-level data. The probabilities of recession are obtained from univariate and multivariate regime-switching models based on a pairwise combination of national and state-level data. We use two classes of combination...

DSGE models are currently estimated with a two step approach: data is first filtered and then DSGE structural parameters are estimated. Two step procedures have problems, ranging from trend misspecification to wrong assumption about the correlation between trend and cycles. In this paper, I...

Several economic data series of Liechtenstein are backwardly estimated in order to achieve consistent historic time series. The generated series consist for instance of the national income for the years 1954 to 1992 (by regressive inter- and retropolation with indicators) and 1993 to 1997 (by...

Resumo: São testadas duas formas distintas de assimetria cíclica, a deepness e a steepness, através da aplicação do teste do coeficiente de enviesamento e do teste triples. A assimetria é analisada em vinte e três países, segundo uma perspectiva secular do PIB real per capita (1820/70 a...

This paper provides an extensive analysis of the predictive ability of financial volatility measures for economic activity. We construct monthly measures of aggregated and industry-level stock volatility, and bond market volatility from daily returns. We model log financial volatility as...

We analyze dynamics of the permanent and transitory components of the U.S. economic activity and the stock market obtained by multivariate dynamic factor modeling. We capture asymmetries over the phases of economic and stock market trends and cycles using independent Markov-switching processes....

This paper studies business cycle interdependence among the industrialized countries since 1958. Using the spillover index methodology recently proposed by Diebold and Yilmaz (2009) and based on the generalized VAR framework, I develop an alternative measure of comovement of macroeconomic...