This paper intends to harmonize two different approaches employed in the analysis of business cycles 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...

This paper deals with the existence and identification of a common European growth cycle. Univariate Markov switching autoregressions are used for individual countries in order to detect changes in the mean growth rate of industrial production. A Markov switching vector autoregression model is...