Using Long-, Medium-, and Short-Term Trends to Forecast Turning Points in the Business Cycle: Some International Evidence

This paper provides rules for anticipating business-cycle recessions and recoveries for countries showing asymmetric cycle durations. Based on a Schumpeterian framework, we analyze business cycles as sums of short-, medium-, and long-term cycles defined for a particular class of unobserved component models. By associating the trend with the low frequencies of the pseudo-spectrum in the frequency domain, manipulation of the spectral bandwidth allows us to define subjective length trends with specific properties. In this paper, we show how these properties can be exploited to anticipate business-cycle turning points, not only historically, but also in a true ex-ante forecasting exercise. This procedure is applied to U.S. post-World War II GNP quarterly data, as well as to another set of European countries.