This paper develops a set of approximate band-pass filters designed for use in a wide range of economic applications. In particular, we design and implement a specific band-pass filter which isolates business-cycle fluctuations in macroeconomic time series. This filter was designed to isolate...

This paper investigates the degree of short run and long run comovement in U.S. sectoral output data by estimating sectoral trends and cycles. A theoretical model based on Long and Plosser (1983) is used to derive a reduced form for sectoral output from first principles. Cointegration and common...

This paper evaluates the consistency of the NBER business cycle reference dates over time. Analysis of the NBER methods suggests that the early turning points are derived from detrended data, while the dates after 1927 are derived from data in levels. To evaluate the importance of this and other...

The conventional wisdom in macroeconomic modeling is to attribute business cycle fluctuations to innovations in the level of the fundamentals. Though volatility shocks could be important too, their propagating mechanism is still not well understood partly because modeling the latent volatilities...

Switzerland could be considered as a test case for international corporate-tax policy coordination. It is a federation of 26 fiscally autonomous cantons that have been taxing corporate profits more or less independently for over a century. We document and discuss corporate taxation in...