The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the need for timely and granular information to assess the state of the economy in real time. Weekly and daily indices have been constructed using higher frequency data to address this need. Yet the seasonal and calendar adjustment of the underlying time...

Hamilton (2017) criticises the Hodrick and Prescott (1981, 1997) filter (HP filter) because of three drawbacks (i. spurious cycles, ii. end-of-sample bias, iii. ad hoc assumptions regarding the smoothing parameter) and proposes a regression filter as an alternative. I demonstrate that Hamilton's...

The Basel III framework advises considering a reference indicator at the country level to guide the setting of the countercyclical capital buffer: the credit-to-GDP gap. In this paper, I provide empirical evidence suggesting that the credit-to-GDP gap is subject to spurious medium-term cycles,...

We show that one should not use the one-sided Hodrick-Prescott filter (HP-1s) as the real-time version of the two-sided Hodrick-Prescott filter (HP-2s): First, in terms of the extracted cyclical component, HP-1s fails to remove low-frequency fluctuations to the same extent as HP-2s. Second,...

I show that the detrending of financial variables with the Hodrick and Prescott (1981, 1997) (HP) and band-pass filters leads to spurious cycles. I find that distortions become especially severe when considering medium-term cycles, i.e., cycles that exceed the duration of regular business...