In this paper we provide evidence on the presence of seasonal unit roots in aggregate U.S. data. The analysis is conducted using the approach developed by Hyllebcrg, Engle, Granger and Yoo (1990). We first derive the mechanics and asyrnptotics of the HEGY procedure for monthly data and use Monte...

Seasonal adjustment procedures attempt to estimate the sample realizations of an unobservable economic time series in the presence of both seasonal factors and irregular factors. In this paper we consider a factor which has not been considered explicitly in previous treatments of seasonal...

The following paper discusses the analysis of some types of economic time series using an altered time scale, or operational time. It is argued that for some series, observations that are ordinarily thought of as equidistant in time are actually irregularly spaced in a more natural time scale....

Almost all recent research on macroeconomic fluctuations has worked with seasonally adjusted or annual data. This paper takes a different approach by treating seasonal fluctuations as worthy of study in their own right. We document the quantitative importance of seasonal fluctuations, and we...

A growing literature associates poverty with biases in decision-making. We investigate this link in a sample of over 3,000 small-scale farmers in Zambia, who participated in a series of experiments involving the opportunity to exchange randomly assigned household items for alternative items of...

We examine the retail prices and wholesale prices of a large supermarket chain in Chicago over seven and one-half years. We show that prices tend to fall during the seasonal demand peak for a product and that changes in retail margins account for most of those price changes; thus we add to the...

Using disaggregated production data we show that the size of seasonal cycles changes significantly over the course of the business cycle. In particular, during periods of high economy-wide activity, some industries smooth seasonal fluctuations while others exaggerate them. We interpret this...

Since macroeconomists first began the systematic study of aggregate data, they have grappled with the fact that most economic time series exhibit substantial seasonal variation. In general, macroeconomists abstract from this seasonal variation, both in their models of cyclical behavior and in...