A variety of filters that are commonly employed by econometricians are analysed with a view to determining their effectiveness in extracting well-defined components of economic data sequences. These components can be defined in terms of their spectral structures—i.e. their frequency...

The Hodrick-Prescott filter is the probably most popular tool for trend estimation in economics. Compared to other frequently used methods like the Baxter-King filter it allows to estimate the trend for the most recent periods of a time series. However, the Hodrick- Prescott filter suffers from...

Penalized splines have become a popular tool to model the trend component in economic time series. The outcome of the spline predominantly depends on the choice of a penalization parameter that controls the smoothness of the trend. This paper derives the penalization of splines by frequency...