The time series literature reports two stylized facts about output dynamics in the United States. GNP growth is positively autocorrelated over short horizons and negatively autocorrelated over longer horizons, and GNP has an important trend reverting component which has a hump-shaped moving...

This paper studies the effects of applying the Hodrick-Prescott filter to trend and difference stationary time series. Applying the Hodrick-Prescott filter to an integrated process is similar to detrending a random walk. When the data are difference stationary, the Hodrick-Prescott filter can...

Applying the Hodrick-Prescott filter to both the approximating model and the data adds a constant to the log-likelihood function. Thus, maximum likelihood estimates and likelihood ratio statistics are invariant to symmetric HP filtering.

We estimate a Bayesian vector autoregression for the U.K. with drifting coefficients and stochastic volatilities. We use it to characterize posterior densities for several objects that are useful for designing and evaluating monetary policy, including local approximations to the mean,...

This paper evaluates a number of non-structural measures of the business cycle. It adopts a structural definition of the cycle, interprets non-structural measures as noisy approximations, and seeks a proxy that is reliable across a variety of plausible trend-cycle structures. The results favor a...