This paper codifies in a systematic and transparent way a historical chronology of business cycle turning points for Spain reaching back to 1850 at annual frequency, and 1939 at monthly frequency. Such an exercise would be incomplete without assessing the new chronology itself and against...

In modern economies, sharp increases in unemployment from major adverse shocks result in long periods of abnormal unemployment and low output. This chapter investigates the processes that account for these persistent slumps. The data are from the economy of the United States, and the discussion...

This paper investigates why the U.S. unemployment rate rose only a few percentage points despite the dramatic decline in government spending and other upheaval at the end of World War II. Using a new longitudinal data set based on archival sources and government surveys, we study the many facets...

Consumption and investment comove over the business cycle in response to shocks that permanently move the price of investment. The interpretation of these shocks has relied on standard one-sector models or on models with two or more sectors that can be aggregated. However, the same...

In this paper, we investigate the main features of the Italian financial cycle, extracted by means of a structural trend-cycle decomposition of the credit-to-GDP ratio, using annual observations from 1861 to 2011. In order to draw conclusions based on solid historical data, we provide a thorough...

This study shows that China’s Consumer Expectation Index contains useful information about pure expectation shocks, which are unrelated to economic fundamentals. It turns out that such shocks are likely to be an important independent driver of industrial output growth.

This Paper is an exercise in dating the euro area business cycle on a monthly basis. We construct several monthly European real GDP series, and then apply the Bry-Boschan (1971) procedure. Using this method we identify four business cycles. Studying further indicators of business activity, we...

During the early years of its existence, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) assembled an extensive data set on all aspects of the pre-WWII macroeconomy. Until 1978, this data set existed only on the handwritten sheets to which the early NBER researchers copied the data from original...

In this paper, I present two different methods that can be used to obtain a concise set of descriptive results about the comovement of variables. The statistics are easy to interpret and capture important information about the dynamics in the system that would be lost if one focused only on the...