The main contribution of this paper is the construction of a metric based on optimal filtering for measuring the distortionary effect of filters. The Hodrick-Prescott filter (HP-filter) has been critizised for inducing spurious cycles when filtering macroeconomic time series with the "typical...

I reconsider the empirical relationship between business cycles and economic growth and pose the question: How long are business cycles when we try to distinguish between business cycles and economic growth? There is a common held view - a myth - that the cyclical component has a period up to...

We study the hypothesis that there is a connection between business cycles and economic growth. If economic growth and business cycles were completely independent of each other, then changes in the growth rate would be unrelated to dates of business cycle turning points (apart from pure...