This paper examines the convergence of regional business cycles in the decades that followed Italy's Unification. The aggregate construction series point to cyclical convergence, but a sectorlevel analysis traces this result to the decline in differentiated "regional-policy" shocks. The regional...

In this paper we deal with several issues related to the quantification of business surveys. In particular, we propose and compare new ways of scoring the ordinal responses concerning the qualitative assessment of the state of the economy, such as the spectral envelope and cumulative logit...

The paper explores and illustrates some of the typical trade-offs which arise in designing filters for the measurement of trends and cycles in economic time series, focusing, in particular, on the fundamental trade-off between the reliability of the estimates and the magnitude of the revisions...

The paper evaluates the potential of band spectral estimation for extracting signals in economic time series. Two situations are considered. The first deals with trend extraction when the original data have been permanently altered by routine operations, such as prefiltering, temporal...

The chapter deals with parametric models for the measurement of the business cycle in economic time series. It presents univariate methods based on parametric trend–cycle decompositions and multivariate models featuring a Phillips type relationship between the output gap and inflation and the...