This paper introduces a new empirical strategy for the characterization of business cycles. It combines non-parametric decoding methods that classify a series into expansions and recessions but does not require specification of the underlying stochastic process generating the data. It then uses...

The official beginning of the new Millennium, bureaucratically correct on January 1, 2001, gives occasion to reconsider the meanings of that divide in time celebrated globally a while ago. A year into the new century, one is still hard put, in our part of the world, to find public utterances...

Focuses on the period from the 1970s.