This paper presents a Bayesian assessment of the likelihood of unit roots in the unemployment rates of 16 OECD countries. Bayesian techniques for detecting multiple structural breaks in time series have recently been developed by Wang and Zivot (2000). I apply these tests to a data set recently...

This paper has three main objectives. First, we re-examine some recent findings that suggest a structural decline in the variance of GDP growth in the United States. We estimate a univariate model in which both the mean growth rate of GDP and its variance are influenced by latent state variables...

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of using a Markov switching model to measure the synchronization of business cycles. We use a Bayesian, Gibbs sampling approach to estimate a multivariate Markov switching model of GDP growth for several countries. We look for evidence...