The long and sustained expansion of the nineties has generated, especially in the US, widespread rumours about the “death of the cycle”. Nevertheless, towards the end of the last decade, it became clear that fluctuations of economic activity were far from being extinct. This has contributed...

In this paper I compare different models, a linear and a non-linear one, for forecasting industrial production by means of some related indicators. I claim that the difficulties associated with the correct identification of a non-linear model could be a possible cause of the often observed worse...

This paper analyses the use of TRAMO-SEATS to seasonally adjust Italian industrial production index. The problem of preliminary transformation of the series is illustrated, together with the way to deal with this issue with TRAMOSEATS. The subject of the revisions and, in general, of the use of...

The use of linear parametric models for forecasting economic time series is widespread among practitioners, in spite of the fact that there is a large evidence of the presence of non-linearities in many of such time series. However, the empirical results stemming from the use of non-linear...

The number and the distribution of non-working days during the year has recently entered the policy debate related to the slow pace of the European economy.The fact that the number of non-working days can affect the quarter to quarter performance of GDP is well known and hardly disputable. It...

The problem of dating the business cycle has recently received many contributions, with a lot of proposed statistical methodologies, parametric and non parametric. Despite of this, only a few countries produce an official dating of the business cycle. In this work we try to apply some procedures...

A typical problem of the seasonal adjustment procedures arises when the observed series is subject to structural breaks. In fact, using the full time interval, the seasonal adjusted series can differ from the "true" seasonal adjusted series, with unclear evidence showed by the usual diagnostic...