Summary A reliable leading indicator should possess the following properties: (1) The movements in the indicator series should resemble those in the business cycle reference series. (2) The relation between the reference series and the indicator should be statistically significant and stable...

At the core of this essay is the idea that cognition is best described as a highly developed homeostatic device aiming to maintain a dynamic equilibrium between internal representations and changes in environmental conditions. The author emphasizes the fundamental role played by aesthetics in...

It is a common assertion that, in a world with perfect markets and rational expectations, endogenous cycles could only arise under very unrealistic assumptions. This paper offers a short discussion on this claim and a review of the relevant contributions to the literature on deterministic...

This paper proposes a novel derivation of the Hodrick-Prescott (HP) minimization problem which leads to a generalization of the Hodrick-Prescott filter. The main result is the development of a new filter to extract a localized maximum-likelihood estimate of the cycle from a series. This new...

Several recent studies show that seasonal variation and cyclical variation in unemployment are correlated. A common finding is that seasonality tends to differ across the business cycle stages of recessions and expansions. Since seasonal adjustment methods assume that the two sources of...

There is now a great deal of empirical evidence that business cycle fluctuations contain asymmetries. I focus on a theoretical model intended to capture the nonlinear behavior of aggregate output following a large negative shock. Nonlinearity introduced by Bayesian updating and an information...

The theoretical analysis of investment under uncertainty has been revolutionized over the last decade by the importation of ideas from finance. If investment is irreversible, there is a return to waiting. So although circumstances may suggest that it is profitable to invest, there may also be an...

Summary This paper applies multivariate linear discriminant analysis to classify West German business cycles from 1955 to 1994 into a four phase scheme (upswing, downswing, and upper/lower turning point phases). It describes the scheme as well as the selection of the classifying variables, and...

Summary In pursuing their plans economic agents regularly have to adjust their pacing of orders, production, and deliveries in unanticipated ways. Information constraints turn many of these adjustments into myopic reactions to accelerations/decelerations observed in the activity level of...

Summary Using a binary reference series based on the dating procedure of Artis, Kontolemis and Osborn (1997) different procedures for predicting turning points of the German business cycles were tested. Specifically, a probit model as proposed by Estrella and Mishkin (1997) as well as...