This paper intends to harmonize two different approaches to the analysis of the business cycle and in doing so it retrieves the stylized facts of the business cycle in Europe. We start with the “classical” approach proposed in Burns and Mitchell (1946) of dating and analyzing the business...

We analyze the time-series of prices in the Spanish electricity market by means of a time varying-transition-probabilities Markov Switching model. Accounting for demand and supply conditions, we show that the time-series of prices is characterized by two significantly different price levels....