Using long time series for sovereign bond markets of fifteen industrialized economies from 1875 to 2009, I find that financial market integration by the end of the 20th century was higher than in earlier periods and exhibited a J-shaped trend with a trough in the 1920s. The main reason for the...

In this paper we investigate whether the dynamic properties of the U.S. business cycle have changed in the last fifty years. For this purpose we develop a flexible business cycle indicator that is constructed from a moderate set of macroeconomic time series. The coincident economic indicator is...

To study the effect of the euro on international goods trade one typically estimates a panel model for the level of trade. Trade levels increase over time, and we show that this is not fully explained by the included regressors. Because the euro is only present at the end of the sample, this may...

We explore a periodic analysis in the context of unobserved components time series models that decompose time series into components of interest such as trend and seasonal. Periodic time series models allow dynamic characteristics to depend on the period of the year, month, week or day. In the...

To gain insights in the current status of the economy, macroeconomic time series are often decomposed into trend, cycle and irregular components. This can be done by nonparametric band-pass filtering methods in the frequency domain or by model-based decompositions based on autoregressive moving...