One of the main topics of macroeconomics analysis is to assess the causes and transmission of business cycles. In order to address this issue, macroeconomists have analysed the response of output to different types of shocks. However, since a shock is by definition an unobserved variable, there...

Hodrick-Prescott (HP) Filter of (most often, seasonally adjusted) quaterly series is analysed. Some of the criticism to the filter are adressed. It is seen that, while filtering strongly affects autocorrelations, it has little effect on crosscorrelations. It is argued that the criticism that HP...

More than thirty years ago Milton Friedman proposed a 'plucking' model of business fluctuations in which output cannot exceed a ceiling level, but will, from time to time, be plucked downward by recession. The model implied that business fluctuations are asymmetric, that recessions have only a...

Floquet theory is an appropriate tool for studying ordinary linear recurrence and differential equations with periodic coefficients, and is a generalization of the theory for constant coefficients. Floquet theory has still not found its way into economics, although it seems to be relevant for...

Floquet theory is an appropriate tool for studying ordinary linear recurrence and differential equations with periodic coefficients, and is a generalization of the theory for constant coefficients. Floquet theory has still not found its way into economics, although it seems to be relevant for...

In this paper we examine the alternative detrending methods used to identify the stylised facts of the business cycle and develop a simple smoothing procedure that can be used to estimate the asymmetric cycles digested by an important class of macroeconomic models. To illustrate the properties...

The paper contains some implications for applied econometric research. Two important ones are, first, that invertible models, such as AR or VAR models, cannot in general be used to model seasonally adjusted or detrended data. The second one is that to look at the business cycle in detrended...

QUEST was designed to analyse the economies in the member states of the European Union and their interactions with the rest of the world, especially with the United States and Japan. The focus of the model is oc the transmission of the effects of economic policy both on the domestic and...