The business cycle has long been the focus of empirical economic research. Until recently statistical analysis of macroeconomic fluctuations was dominated by linear time series methods. Over the past 15 years, however, economists have increasingly applied tractable parametric nonlinear time...

A growing body of literature argues that the financial cycle is considerably longer in duration and larger in amplitude than the business cycle and that its distinguishing features became more pronounced over time. This paper proposes an empirical approach suitable to test these hypotheses. We...