Recent work on trend-cycle decompositions for US real GDP yields the following puzzling features: method based on Unobserved Components models, the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition, the Hodrick-Prescott filter and others yield very different cycles which bears little resemblance to the NBER...

Monetary policy conducted in real time has to take into account the preliminary nature of recent national accounts data. Not only recent data, but also figures dating many years back are potentially subject to revisions. This means that there is a danger that an important part of the central...

In this paper, we develop an analytical framework for the estimation of potential output and output gaps for the euro area combining multivariate filtering techniques with the production function approach. The advantage of this methodology lies in the fact that it combines a model based approach...

The output gap plays a crucial role in thinking and actions of many central banks but real time measurements undergo substantial revisions as more data become available (Orphanides (2001), Orphanides and van Norden (forthcoming)). Some central banks augment, such as the Bank of Canada and the...

Recent work has found that, without the benefit of hindsight, it can prove difficult for policy-makers to pin down accurately the current position of the output gap; real-time estimates are unreliable. However, attention primarily has focused on output gap point estimates alone. But point...