Inventory fluctuations play an important role in the formation of business cycles. In Germany, little research has been dedicated to this topic recently. In this study, a structural time series model in the tradition of Harvey (1989) is employed to decompose German inventory investment into...

A time-varying natural rate of interest is estimated for the euro area using a multivariate unobserved components model. The problem of aggregating interest rate data for the pre-EMU period is directly addressed, and a simple method is proposed in order to adjust the risk premia in the interest...

Two possibilities of analysis of economic cycles are studied in this document. Firstly, filter-design approaches consisting of the extraction of the information content of certain signals between two specific frequencies, as well as below or above certain frequencies. Secondly, model-based...

We use an unobserved components model to extract the foreign exchange risk premium from the excess ex post returns of East Asian currency assets over US dollar assets and derive the implied expected future spot rates of East Asian currencies against the US dollar. Empirical results, obtained...

This paper proposes a new approach for estimating potential output and the NAIRU. The methodology models these key unobservable economic variables as latent stochastic trends within a trivariate system of observables comprising information on unemployment, GDP, and inflation. Identification is...

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...