This paper intends to harmonize two different approaches to the analysis of the business cycle and in doing so it retrieves the stylized facts of the business cycle in Europe. We start with the `classical` approach proposed in Burns and Mitchell (1946) of dating and analyzing the business cycle;...

This paper proposes a new framework for the impulse-response analysis of business cycle transitions. A cointegrated vector autoregressive Markov-switching model is found to be a congruent representation of post-war US employment and output data. In this model some parameters change according to...

This paper introduces the concept of common deterministic shifts (CDS). This concept is simple, intuitive and relates to the common structure of shifts or policy interventions. We propose a Reduced Rank technique to investigate the presence of CDS. The proposed testing procedure has standard...

This paper deals with the existence and identification of a common European growth cycle. Univariate Markov switching autoregressions are used for individual countries in order to detect changes in the mean growth rate of industrial production. A Markov switching vector autoregression model is...

This paper deals with the existence and identification of a common European Growth Cycle. It has recently been argued that the formation of a monetary union creates in itself a tendency for business cycle symmetry to emerge. If this holds for the European monetary Union and the quasi-union of...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the efficiency of the Chilean tax system. For analytical purposes we distinguish between the tax structure and the performance of the tax administration. The tax structure is relatively efficient. Consumption taxes acco