This paper, using 40 years of monthly industrial production data, examines the relationship between the business cycles of the 12 euro area countries. Since estimates of the business cycle have been found to be sensitive to how the cycle is measured, a range of alternative measures is...

The intricate issue of detecting and forecasting macroeconomic cycles turning points has been once more perfectly illustrated with the global downturn experienced by most countries around the world in 2000-2001. Governments and Central Banks are very sensitive to economic indicators showing...

Methods for continuously monitoring business cycles are compared. A turn in a leading index can be used to predict a turn in the business cycle. Three likelihood based methods for turning point detection are compared in detail by using the theory of statistical surveillance and by simulations....

In an important paper, Diebold and Rudebusch (1991) find that, despite good performance for post revision historical versions, the U.S. Index of Leading Economic Indicators (LEI) fails to improve forecasts in real time out-of-sample tests. This paper revisits the issue of real-time performance...

In this paper, we develop a likelihood approach for quantification of qualitative survey data on expectations and perceptions and we propose a new test for expectation consistency (unbiasedness). Our quantification scheme differs from existing methods primarily by using prior information...

Business cycle indexes are used to get a timely and frequent description of the state of the economy and its likely development in the near future. This paper discusses two methods for constructing business cycle indexes, the traditional NBER method and a recently developed dynamic factor model,...

The Swiss Institute for Business Cycle Research regularly conducts business tendency surveys (BTS) amongst manufacturing firms. The information thus generated is available with a publication lead to the official Swiss sales, production, order and inventory statistics. It is shown that the survey...

This paper examines the consequences of using so-called "real-time" data for business cycle analysis in Germany. Based on a novel data set covering quarterly real output data from 1980 to 2002 real-time output gaps using some popular filter methods are calculated. They differ considerably from...

This paper uses survey data in order to analyse and assess the empirical properties of consumers’ inflation expectations in the euro area and explores their role in explaining the observed dynamics of inflation. The probability approach is used to derive quantitative estimates of euro area...

This paper fits Markov switching models to quarterly New Zealand aggregate GDP growth rates for the period 1978:1 to 2003:2 in order to analyse changes in mean and volatility over time. The models considered are drawn from a simple class of parsimonious, four state, Markov switching models which...