Separating cyclical movement from trend growth at seasonal and business cycle frequencies is important to macroeconomic research. At business cycle frequencies, time trends, first differences and the more recent Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter are used to separate trends from cycles. At seasonal...

Empirical tests of the production-smoothing hypothesis have yielded mixed results. In this paper, Donald Allen looks for, and finds evidence of, seasonal production smoothing in 15 out of 25 manufacturing series and 8 out of 10 retail series, using detrended seasonally unadjusted data. The...

Empirical tests of the production-smoothing hypothesis have yielded mixed results. In this paper, Donald Allen looks for and finds evidence of seasonal production smoothing in 15 out of 25 manufacturing series and eight out of 10 retail series, using detrended seasonally unadjusted data. The...

We consider a dynamic, stochastic equilibrium business cycle model which is augmented to reflect seasonal shifts in preferences, technology, and government purchases. Our estimated parameterization implies implausibly large seasonal variation in the state of technology: rising at an annual rate...

Conventional wisdom has it that inventory investment destabilizes the economy because it is procyclical to sales. Khan and Thomas (2007) show that the conventional wisdom is wrong in a general equilibrium (S,s) model with capital. We argue that their finding is not robust—the conventional...