The current economic expansion is one of the more enduring in New Zealand’s post-war period. But is this a change from past behaviour? We examine New Zealand’s post-war business cycles for the sample period 1946 to 2005, using a newly developed 60-year quarterly time series for real GDP. The...

We study the properties of a test that determines whether two time series comove. The test computes a simple nonparametric statistic for “concordance,” which describes the proportion of time that the cycles of two series spend in the same phase. We establish the size and power properties of...