The synthesis of the dynamic factor model of Stock and Watson (1989) and the regime-switching model of Hamilton (1989) proposed by Diebold and Rudebusch (1996) potentially encompasses both features of the business cycle identified by Burns and Mitchell (1946): (1) comovement among economic...

A large body of research suggests that uncertainty is an important factor affecting economic activity. Most earlier research, however, fails to consider the possibility that uncertainty may affect the value of new information and economic activity differently, depending upon its source. The...

We hope to answer three questions: Has there been a structural break in postwar U.S. real GDP growth towards stabilization? If so, when? What is the nature of this structural break? We employ a Bayesian approach to identify a structural break at an unknown changepoint in a Markov-switching model...