Seasonality in macroeconomic time series can obscure movements of other components in a series that are operationally more important for economic and econometric analyses. Indeed, in practice one often prefers to work with seasonally adjusted data to assess the current state of the economy and...

Multivariate analysis can help to focus on economic phenomena, including trend and cyclical movements. To allow for potential correlation with seasonality, the present paper studies a three component multivariate unobserved component model, focusing on the case of quarterly data and showing that...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms that face search complementarities in the formation of vendor contracts. Search complementarities amplify small differences in productivity among firms. Market concentration fosters monopsony power in the labor...

Within a New Zealand business cycle context, we assess whether Hamilton's (H84) OLS regression methodology produces stylised business cycle facts which are materially different from HP1600 measures, and whether using the H84 predictor and other forecast extensions improves the HP filter's...

Economists typically use seasonally adjusted data in which the assumption is imposed that seasonality is uncorrelated with trend and cycle. The importance of this assumption has been highlighted by the Great Recession. The paper examines an unobserved components model that permits non-zero...

An updated version of our Markov-switching model of U.S. real GDP clearly suggests the COVID-19 recession was more U shaped than L shaped. As with linear time series models, it is important to account for extreme outliers during the pandemic, but a simple decay function for volatility from...

We propose a methodology for producing forecast densities for economic aggregates based on disaggregate evidence. Our ensemble predictive methodology utilizes a linear mixture of experts framework to combine the forecast densities from potentially many component models. Each component represents...

It is commonly understood that macroeconomic shocks influence commodity prices and that one channel for this is the link between interest rates, expected future asset returns and stockholding. In this paper the link is extended to the petroleum market with the recognition that recorded stocks of...

We show the importance of endogenous oil prices and production in the real business cycle framework. Endogenising these variables improves the model's predictions of business cycle statistics, oil related and non-oil related, relative to a situation where either is exogenous. This result is...

We explore the historical relationship between financial conditions and real economic growth for quarterly U.S. data from 1875 to 2017 with a flexible empirical copula modelling methodology. We compare specifications with both linear and non-linear dependence, and with both Gaussian and...