The problem of business-cycle symmetry is addressed within the context of time reversibility. To this effect, the authors introduce a time domain test of time reversibility, the TR test. In an application, they show that time irreversibility is the rule rather than the exception for two...

We test whether monetary shocks had asymmetric output effects before World War II. Ball and Mankiw (1994) show that expectations of persistent inflation under fiat money can explain why negative monetary shocks had larger effects than positive shocks after World War II. Consistent with this...

Building upon Beaudry and Koop's (1993) analysis, we consider a "current depth of the recession" (CDR) variable in modeling the time-series behavior of the postwar quarterly U.S. unemployment rate. The CDR approach is consistent with the state-dependent behavior in the unemployment rate...

Asymmetric behavior has been documented in postwar quarterly U.S. unemployment rates. This suggests that improvement over conventional linear forecasts may be possible through the use of nonlinear time-series models. In this note an out-of-sample forecasting competition is carried out for a set...

In this paper we use smooth transition vector error-correction models (STVECMs) in a simulated out-of-sample forecasting experiment for the unemployment rates of the four non-Euro G-7 countries, the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Japan. For the U.S., pooled forecasts constructed by taking the...

This paper provides a guide to two FORTRAN programs, called TRT1.FOR and TRT2.FOR, written to run the two stages of the Ramsey and Rothman (1996) time-reversibility (TR) test. Original FORTRAN source code and executable (on an IBM-compatible PC) versions of the programs are available. The major...