The paper reconsiders the Hodrick-Prescott filter and the issue of a suitable choice of its smoothing parameter λ for quarterly data. To this end stochastic processes generate artificial data with a known growth trend and cyclical component, and a battery of Monte Carlo experiments tests what...

In this paper we empirically examine a hybrid New-Keynesian model with heterogeneous bounded rational agents who may adopt an optimistic or pessimistic attitude - so called animal spirits - towards future movements of the output and inflation gap. The model is estimated via the simulated method...