The recent volatile behaviour of U.K. inflation has been officially attributed to a sequence of “unusual” price changes, prompting renewed interest in the construction of measures of “core inflation”, from which such unusual price changes may be down-weighted or even excluded. This paper...

1 Introduction -- 2 ‘Classical’ Techniques of Modelling Trends and Cycles -- 3 Stochastic Trends and Cycles -- 4 Filtering Economic Time Series -- 5 Nonlinear and Nonparametric Trend and Cycle Modelling -- 6 Multivariate Modelling of Trends and Cycles -- 7 Conclusions.

<p >Covers the key issues required for students wishing to understand and analyse the core empirical issues in economics. It focuses on descriptive statistics, probability concepts and basic econometric techniques and has an accompanying website that contains all the data used in the examples and...</p>