This paper has two sources: One is my own research in three broad areas: business cycles, economic measurement and social choice. In all of these fields I attempted to apply the basic precepts of the scientific method as it is understood in the natural sciences. I found that my effort at using...

This paper has two sources: One is my own research in three broad areas: business cycles, economic measurement and social choice. In all of these fields I attempted to apply the basic precepts of the scientific method as it is understood in the natural sciences. I found that my effort at using...

Maravall and del Río (2001), analized the time aggregation properties of the Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter, which decomposes a time series into trend and cycle, for the case of annual, quarterly, and monthly data, and showed that aggregation of the disaggregate component cannot be obtained as...

We estimate a Bayesian vector autoregression for the U.K. with drifting coefficients and stochastic volatilities. We use it to characterize posterior densities for several objects that are useful for designing and evaluating monetary policy, including local approximations to the mean,...

One widespread idea in the business cycles literature is that the older is an expansion or contraction, the more likely it is to end. This paper tries to provide further empirical support for this idea of positive duration dependence and, at the same time, control for the effects of other...

We identify the cyclical turning points of 74 U.S. manufacturing industries and uncover new empirical regularities: (i) Cyclical phase shifts are highly concentrated around the aggregate turning points; (ii) In contrast to the conventional notion of a sudden stop and slow recovery, troughs are...

Can frictionless small open economy models driven solely by technology shocksaccount for business cycles in developing countries? We don't find evidence of it. We build a DSGE model that jointly includes a variety of real perturbations in addition to technology shocks, such as procyclical fiscal...

The shadow economy is an extensive phenomenon worldwide. It poses several questions, the consequences on fluctuations in economic activity being among the major ones. Based on official data, this paper establishes a set of cyclical properties of macroeconomic aggregates and studies how these...

During the last decades auctions of selected wines have regularly taken place in Denmark. Therefore, by now, a considerable amount of data exists for auction wine prices, i.e. both the assessed wine prices of the auctioneer and the eventual price at which the wines are sold. From these data the...