We investigate the presence of international business cycles in macroeconomic aggregates (output, consumption, investment) using a panel of 60 countries over the period 1961 - 2014. The paper presents a Bayesian stochastic factor selection approach for dynamic factor models with predetermined...

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...

The failure to describe the time series behaviour of most realexchange rates as temporary deviations from fixedlong-term means may be due to time variation of the equilibriathemselves, see Engel (2000). We implement thisidea using an unobserved components model and decompose theobservations on...

This paper investigates business cycle relations among different economies in theEuro area. Cyclical dynamics are explicitly modelled as part of a time series model. Weintroduce mechanisms that allow for increasing or diminishing phase shifts and for time-varyingassociation patterns in different...

Convergence in gross domestic product series of five European countriesis empirically identified using multivariate time series models that arebased on unobserved components with dynamic converging properties.We define convergence in terms of a decrease in dispersion over timeand model this...

Risk is at the center of many policy decisions in companies, governments and other institutions. The risk of road fatalities concerns local governments in planning counter- measures, the risk and severity of counterparty default concerns bank risk managers on a daily basis and the risk of...

In this paper we replace the Gaussian errors in the standard Gaussian, linear state space model with stochastic volatility processes. This is called a GSSF-SV model. We show that conventional MCMC algorithms for this type of model are ineffective, but that this problem can be removed by...