The recent renaissance of business cycle analysis has led to a renewed interest in business cycle classification as pioneered by Burns/Mitchell, Spiethoff and resumed in the seventies by Meyer/Weinberg (1975a, b). The rather successful elaboration and test of a “modern” four-phase...

Although the cyclical aspects of worker reallocation are investigated in numerous studies, only scarce empirical evidence exists for Germany. Kluve, Schaffner, and Schmidt (2009) emphasize the heterogeneity of cyclical influences for different subgroups of workers, defined by age, gender and...

This paper analyses the influence of 13 stylized facts of the German economy on the West German business cycles from 1955 to 1994. The method used in this investigation is Statistical Experimental Design with orthogonal factors. We are looking for all existing Plackett-Burman designs realizable...

When analyzing business cycle data, one observes that the relevant predictor variables are often highly correlated. This paper presents a method to obtain measures of importance for the classification of data in which such multicollinearity is present. In systems with highly correlated variables...

Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) performs well for classifica- tion of business phases – even though the premises of an LDA are not met. As the variables are highly correlated there are numerical as well as interpretational shortcomings. By transforming the classification problem to a...

We propose multivariate classification as a statistical tool to describe business cycles. These cycles are often analyzed as a univariate phenomenon in terms of GNP or industrial net production ignoring additional information in other economic variables. Multivariate classification overcomes...