We analyze potential interactions between the cyclic fluctuations in credit and activity in five countries of the Central Africa Monetary and Economic Union (CAMEU) economies. Cycles are extracted by using a pass-band filter, and then characterized over the period 1960-2008 according to the Bry...

This paper compares the depth of the recent crisis and the Great Depression. We use a new data set to compare the drop in activity in the industrialized countries for seven activity indicators. This is done under the assumption that the recent crisis leveled off in mid-2009 for production and...

This paper presents a univariate model that analyzes systematic changes in the behavior of the business cycle in the Dominican Republic, capturing changes in average growth and identifying differences between contractions and expansions with respect to their persistence and duration. To do so,...

In this Paper we compare alternative approaches for dating the euro area business cycle and analysing its characteristics. First, we extend a commonly used dating procedure to allow for length, size and amplitude restrictions, and to compute the probability of a phase change. Second, we apply...

The aim of this paper is the identification of structural shocks which affect the dynamics of sectoral inventories, through an analysis of the forecasting error variance decomposition. This identification is achieved using the American and French time series of aggregate production, sectoral...

It is high time we rediscovered the role of the financial cycle in macroeconomics. In the environment that has prevailed for at least three decades now, it is not possible to understand business fluctuations and the corresponding analytical and policy challenges without understanding the...