The Beveridge-Nelson (BN) trend-cycle decomposition based on autoregressive forecasting models of U.S. quarterly real GDP growth produces estimates of the output gap that are strongly at odds with widely-held beliefs about the amplitude, persistence, and even sign of transitory movements in...

The Beveridge-Nelson (BN) trend-cycle decomposition based on autoregressive forecasting models of U.S. quarterly real GDP growth produces estimates of the output gap that are strongly at odds with widely-held beliefs about the amplitude, persistence, and even sign of transitory movements in...

An updated version of our Markov-switching model of U.S. real GDP clearly suggests the COVID-19 recession was more U shaped than L shaped. As with linear time series models, it is important to account for extreme outliers during the pandemic, but a simple decay function for volatility from...