Abstract: The paper analyzes cyclical comovements in the Mercosur area differentiating idiosyncratic from common shocks. In the Mercosur (or any region for that matter) shocks can be country-specific, affecting only one country or a specific set of countries (for example, a weather-related...

Procedures are developed to compute the proportion of turning points located in the sample path of time series data. It is shown that the proportion of turning points can be directly related to the data generating process. Methods for estimating model parameters are developed using counts of...