This paper proposes a new model-based method to obtain a coincident indicator for the business cycle. A dynamic factor model with trend components and a common cycle component is considered which can be estimated using standard maximum likelihood methods. The multivariate unobserved components...

Are financial cycles an international phenomenon, and, if so, how do financial cycles interact? This letter provides new evidence for the US and the UK. Considering the properties of the data in both the time and the frequency domains, we find a strong relation between the financial cycles of...

In recent times, a large number of studies has investigated the empirical properties of financial cycles within countries, mainly based on band-pass filter techniques. The contribution of this paper to the literature is twofold. First, in contrast to most existing studies in the financial cycle...

Convergence and synchronisation of business and growth cycles are important issues in the efficient formulation of euro area economic policies, and in particular European Central Bank (ECB) monetary policy. Although several studies in the economics literature address the issue of synchronicity...

The present work applies several advanced spectral methods to the analysis of macroeconomic fluctuations in three countries of the European Union: Italy, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. We focus here in particular on singular-spectrum analysis (SSA), which provides valuable spatial and...

This paper applies volatility measures and VAR spectral analytic techniques to give a thorough description of the salient business cycle characteristics of central NIPA aggregates for the G7. Furthermore, their role in contributing to the supranational G7 and EURO15 cyclic dynamics is...

We estimate a Markow-switching dynamic factor model with three states based on six leading business cycle indicators for Germany preselected from a broader set using the Elastic Net soft-thresholding rule. The three states represent expansions, normal recessions and severe recessions. We show...

This paper applies volatility measures and VAR spectral analytic techniques to give a thorough description of the salient business cycle characteristics of central NIPA aggregates for the G7. Furthermore, their role in contributing to the supranational G7 and EURO15 cyclic dynamics is...