This paper codifies in a systematic and transparent way a historical chronology of business cycle turning points for Spain reaching back to 1850 at annual frequency, and 1939 at monthly frequency. Such an exercise would be incomplete without assessing the new chronology itself and against...

This paper introduces a new empirical strategy for the characterization of business cycles. It combines non-parametric decoding methods that classify a series into expansions and recessions but does not require specification of the underlying stochastic process generating the data. It then uses...

The Business Cycle Dating Committee (BCDC) of the National Bureau of Economic Research provides a historical chronology of business cycle turning points. This paper investigates three central aspects about this chronology: (1) How skillful is the BCDC in classifying economic activity into...

This paper investigates the ability of the Federal Reserve to manipulate the overnight rate without open market operations (which Demiralp and Jorda (2000) term the announcement effect), using high-frequency, open-market-desk data. Using similar data, Hamilton (1997) takes advantage of forecast...

This paper studies the role of credit in the business cycle, with a focus on private credit overhang. Based on a study of the universe of over 200 recession episodes in 14 advanced countries between 1870 and 2008, we document two key facts of the modern business cycle: financial-crisis...

A probabilistic assessment about the set of possible trajectories that a random variable may follow over time is summarized by the simultaneous confidence region generated from its forecast generating distribution. However, if the null model is only approximative or altogether unavailable, one...

This paper investigates the effects of temporal aggregation when the aggregation frequency is variable and possibly stochastic. The results that we report include, as a particular case, the well-known results on fixed-interval aggregation, such as when monthly data is aggregated into quarters. A...

This paper introduces methods for computing impulse response functions that do not require specification and estimation of the unknown dynamic multivariate system itself. The central idea behind these methods is to estimate flexible local projections at each period of interest rather than...

The 1970s and early 1980s witnessed two main approaches to the analysis of monetary policy. The first is the early new classical approach of Lucas, based on the assumptions of rational expectations and market clearing. The second is the atheoretical econometrics of Sims's VAR program. Both have...

This paper measures the degree of monetary policy interdependence between major industrialized countries from a new perspective. The analysis uses a special data set on central bank issued policy rate targets for 14 OECD countries. Methodologically, our approach is novel in that we separately...