This paper uses time-series evidence on construction movements to examine the convergence of regional business cycles in the decades that followed Italy’s unification. The aggregate series point to cyclical convergence, but a sector-level analysis traces this result to the decline in...

In this paper we analyze the synchronization between the business cycles of US and Mexican regions. Regional economic activity in Mexico is measured using regional coincident indexes recently developed at Banco de México, while US aggregate economic activity is measured with the national...

This paper looks at the synchronisation of product per capita in Portuguese regions at a disaggregated level over the period 1988-2010. Furthermore, it examines the volatility of the regional cycles by calculating dispersion measures. As a whole, results indicate that in Portugal, despite the...

Some main Norwegian quarterly macroeconomic time series are decomposed into unobserved components within the framework of structural time series models using UCARIMA models. In the most general case we allow for a stationary cyclical component besides a stochastic trend, a stochastic seasonal...

This study was prepared by Beate Schirwitz while she was working at the Ifo Institute’s Dresden Branch. It was completed in February 2012 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Faculty of Law, Management, and Economics at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in July 2012. It focuses on a...

An examination of Swedish manufacturing data on real output and qualitative business tendency survey (BTS) responses from 1968 through 1998 reveals that survey-based attitude data typically improve the fit of simple autoprojective models of manufacturing output growth. It also turns out that...

The authors use first differenced logged quarterly series for the GDP of 29 countries and the euro area to assess the need to use nonlinear models to describe business cycle dynamic behaviour. Their approach is model (estimation)-free, based on testing only. The authors aim to maximize power to...

We examine sentiment variables as new predictors for US recessions. We combine sentiment variables with either classical recession predictors or with common factors based on a large panel of macroeconomic and ?nancial variables. Sentiment variables hold vast predictive power for US recessions in...

We examine the finite-sample performance of small versus large scale dynamic factor models. Our Monte Carlo analysis reveals that small scale factor models out-perform large scale models in factor estimation and forecasting for high levels of cross-correlation across the idiosyncratic errors of...

We develop a twofold analysis of how the information provided by several economic indicators can be used in Markov-switching dynamic factor models to identify the business cycle turning points. First, we compare the performance of a fully non-linear multivariate specification (one-step approach)...