The paper argues that it is important to realize that the concept of a cycle has rarely been precisely articulated in empirical work and that often researchers are using very different definitions of it. We propose a two-fold classification based upon what series one is measuring a cycle in and...

Economic events such as expansions and recessions in economic activity, bull and bear markets in stock prices and financial crises have long attracted substantial interest. In recent times there has been a focus upon predicting the events and constructing Early Warning Systems of them....

Economic events such as expansions and recessions in economic activity, bull and bear markets in stock prices and financial crises have long attracted substantial interest. In recent times there has been a focus upon predicting the events and constructing Early Warning Systems of them....

The fact that the Global Financial Crisis, and the Great Recession it ushered in, was largely unforeseen, has led to the common opinion that macroeconomic models and analysis is deficient in some way. Of course it has probably always been true that businessmen, journalists and politicians have...

Macroeconometric and fi?nancial researchers often use secondary or constructed binary random variables that differ in terms of their sta- tistical properties from the primary random variables used in micro- econometric studies. One important difference between primary and secondary binary...

Macroeconometric and financial researchers often use binary data constructed in a way that creates serial dependence. We show that this dependence can be allowed for if the binary states are treated as Markov processes. In addition, the methods of construction ensure that certain sequences are...

Macroeconometric and financial researchers often use secondary or constructed binary random variables that differ in terms of their statistical properties from the primary random variables used in microeconometric studies. One important difference between primary and secondary binary variables...

Recent events suggest that the death of the business cycle has been exaggerated; the issue of how one learns about and monitors the business cycle remains centre stage. Advent of the Euro and the potential for tensions when sovereign nations subsume their monetary policy into a single response...

Macroeconomics has a long tradition of inspecting and interpreting patterns in graphs of aggregate data. However, the move towards more precise quantification of macroeconomic phenomena has seen academics shift away from a study of turning points, which are a natural and obvious way of...