The Great Moderation (GM) is widely documented in the literature as one of the most important changes in the US business cycle. All the papers that analyze it use post-WWII data. In this paper, we set the GM for the first time against a long-dated historical backdrop, stretching back a century...

This paper studies the dynamics of the propagation of regional business cycle shocks in Europe and uncovers new features of its underlying mechanisms. To address the lack of high frequency data at the regional level, we propose a new method to measure time-varying synchronization in small...

We propose a set of new quantitative measures to characterise more fully the features of economic recoveries. We apply these measures to post-war US expansions and use cluster analysis to determine that there are two different types of recoveries in recent US economic history, with most...

The aim of this paper is to show the usefulness of Finite Mixture Markov Models (FMMMs) for regional analysis. FMMMs combine clustering techniques and Markov Switching models, providing a powerful methodological framework to jointly obtain business cycle datings and clusters of regions that...

Although there is a vast literature on GDP comovement across countries, there is scant evidence on inflation interdependence. We analyze inflation comovements across a wide set of advanced economies and across the subset of euro area countries. Some of our findings are expected, such as the fact...

Many have argued that the Great Recession of 2008 marked the end of the Great Moderation of the eighties and nineties. Through painstaking empirical analysis of the data, this paper shows this is not the case. Output volatility remains subdued despite the turmoil created by the Great Recession....

A decade after the beginning of the Great Recession, flow external imbalances, measured by the current account (CA) have narrowed markedly. However, stock or net foreign assets (NFA) imbalances have kept increasing and have created challenges for future macroeconomic and financial stability. To...

This paper proposes a new approach to the analysis of the reference cycle turning points, defined on the basis of the specific turning points of a broad set of coincident economic indicators. Each individual pair of specific peaks and troughs from these indicators is viewed as a realization of a...

Much has been written about why economists failed to predict the latest financial and real crisis. Reading the recent literature, it seems that the crisis was so obvious that economists must have been blind when looking at data not to see it coming. In this paper, we analyze whether such claims...

This paper presents a survey of output gap modeling techniques, which are of special interest for policy making institutions. We distinguish between univariate - which estimate trend output on the basis of actual output, without taking into account the information contained in other variables -...