A Markov-switching model of postwar quarterly real GNP growth is used to examine the duration dependence of business cycles. It extends the Hamilton model and the duration-dependent model of Durland and McCurdy, and compares quite favorably to simpler models in out-of-sample forecasting. When an...

Casual examination of annual postwar data on inventories and aggregate output for seven developed countries -- Canada, France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, United States -- suggests that in these countries the primary function of aggregate inventories is not to smooth aggregate...

This paper develops and applies a novel test of the Holt, et al.(1961) linear quadratic inventory model. It is shown that a central property of the model is that a certain weighted sum of variances and covariances of production, sales and inventories must be nonnegative. The weights are the...