Dating business cycles entails ascertaining economy-wide turning points. Broadly speaking, there are two approaches in the literature. The first approach, which dates to Burns and Mitchell (1946), is to identify turning points individually in a large number of series, then to look for a common...

This paper considers the estimation of approximate dynamic factor models when there is temporal instability in the factor loadings. We characterize the type and magnitude of instabilities under which the principal components estimator of the factors is consistent and find that these...

As Nelson and Startz [Nelson, C.R., Startz, R., 1990a. The distribution of the instrumental variable estimator and its t ratio when the instrument is a poor one. Journal of Business 63, S125-S140; Nelson, C.R., Startz, R., 1990b. Some further results on the exact small sample properties of the...