On the Measurement of Business Cycles and Growth Cycles

Business cycles and growth cycles should not be mixed or confused, as is unfortunately often the case in discussions of economic growth. This paper compares various approaches to time series decomposition for the analysis of business cycles and growth cycles as related but separate phenomena. We discuss the phase average trend (PAT) in some detail and compare it with the Hodrick-Prescott and band-pass filter methods of trend estimation. We find that the PAT yields better results for the purposes of identifications and study of growth cycles.