The existence of fluctuations is part of the narrative, especially when there is a slowdown (or worse, a contraction) in economic activity. The presence of long waves with a period of about 50 years as proposed by Kondratieff is one of the most controversial and fascinating theories about...

Our analysis, based on a variety of standard econometric techniques, aims to be a fairly comprehensive test of the hypotheses about long cycles, associated with the name of Kondratiev/Kondratieff. Our work tries to link the issue of long cycles with the issue of economic convergence and...

Recurrent boom-and-bust cycles are a salient feature of economic and finan- cial history. Cycles found in the data are stochastic, often highly persistent, and span substantial fractions of the sample size. We refer to such cycles as “long”. In this paper, we develop a novel approach to...

The purpose of this essay is to determine the forecast horizon of the fifth, sixth and seventh long wave. As the period of each long wave can change according to the data, it has been used a deterministic approach, based on historical chronologies of USA and UK economies worked out by several...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the pattern and behavior of Economic Long Waves over time, using the long-wave chronologies of two driving economies, the USA and the UK. The statistical evidence seems in general to support the hypothesis that Long Waves are not symmetric and their...

To match the NBER business cycle features it is necessary to employ Generalised Dynamic Categorical (GDC) models that impose certain phase restrictions and permit multiple indexes. Theory suggests additional shape restrictions in the form of monotonicity and boundedness of certain transition...

We investigate asymmetries in the conditional mean dynamics of four sectors of the U.S. GDP data. Since the statistical evidence on nonlinearities in the conditional mean could be influenced by the presence of outliers, or by a failure to model conditional heteroskedasticity, we explicitly...

This paper merges two specifications developed recently in the forecasting literature: the MS-MIDAS model introduced by Gu´erin and Marcellino [2011] and the MIDAS-factor model considered in Marcellino and Schumacher [2010]. The MS-factor MIDAS model (MS-FaMIDAS) that we introduce incorporates...

A “stalling” economy has been defined as one that experiences a discrete deterioration in economic performance following a decline in its growth rate to below some threshold level. Previous efforts to identify stalls have focused primarily on the US economy, with the threshold level being...

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...