To date, there has been little investigation of the impact of seasonal adjustment on the detection of business cycle expansion and recession regimes. We study this question both analytically and through Monte Carlo simulations. Analytically, we view the occurrence of a single business cycle...

I investigate the effect of wealth on consumption in a new dataset with financial and housing wealth from 16 countries. The baseline estimation method based on the sluggishness of consumption growth implies that the eventual (long-run) marginal propensity to consume out of total wealth is 5...

This paper presents a simple new method for measuring `wealth effects' on aggregate consumption. The method exploits the stickiness of consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption `habits') to distinguish between immediate and eventual wealth effects. In U.S. data, we...

This paper investigates whether the inherent non-stationarity of macroeconomic time series is entirely due to a random walk or also to non-linear components. Applying the numerical tools of the analysis of dynamical systems to long time series for the US, we reject the hypothesis that these...

The paper attempts to estimate the monthly components of the nominal GDP in order to obtain the monthly nominal GDP for the Romanian economy. All the quarterly time series are available at current prices since 1994 to 2001. The method is a deterministic algorithm that computes unobserved monthly...

We construct a framework for measuring economic activity at high frequency, potentially in real time. We use a variety of stock and flow data observed at mixed frequencies (including very high frequencies), and we use a dynamic factor model that permits exact filtering. We illustrate the...

This paper presents a simple new method for estimating the size of 'wealth effects' on aggregate consumption. The method exploits the well-documented sluggishness of consumption growth (often interpreted as 'habits' in the asset pricing literature) to distinguish between short-run and long-run...

In this note, we revisit the univariate unobserved-component (UC) model of US GDP by relaxing the traditional random-walk assumption of the permanent component. Since our general UC model is unidentified, we investigate the upper bound of the contribution of the transitory component, and find it...

Using two data series, namely GDP and the index of industrial production, we study the relationship between output variability and the growth rate of output. Ng-Perron unit root test shows that the growth rate of GDP is non-stationary but the growth rate of industrial output is stationary. Thus,...

This study develops a common-use proxy based on the so-called "current depth of recession" (CDR) measure of economic performance. The proposed proxy, termed MCDR, removes the limitations of the nonlinear model from the CDR. The MCDR enjoys the benefits of the CDR but also extends directly to...