In this paper we use the Hodrick-Prescott filter for analyzing global temperature data. We are especially concerned with a reliable estimation of the trend component at the end of the data sample. To this end we employ time-varying values for the penalization parameter. The optimal values are...

We propose an estimation strategy that accounts for two major problems raised in the empirical literature testing for the prevalence of the inverted U-shaped relation between environmental degradation and economic activity, namely the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis. First, we use...

The HP filter is the most popular filter for extracting the trend and cycle components from an observed time series. Many researchers consider the smoothing parameter λ = 1600 as something like an universal constant. It is well known that the HP filter is an optimal filter under some...