The existence of fluctuations is part of the narrative, especially when there is a slowdown (or worse, a contraction) in economic activity. The presence of long waves with a period of about 50 years as proposed by Kondratieff is one of the most controversial and fascinating theories about...

Assessing potential output and the output gap is essential for policy-making and fiscal surveillance. The European Commission proposes a production function methodology that involves the estimation of two classes of Gaussian state space models. This paper presents the R package RGAP which...

We propose a simple modification of the time series filter by Hamilton (2018b) that yields reliable and economically meaningful real-time output gap estimates. The original filter relies on 8-quarter ahead forecasts errors of an autoregression. While this approach yields a cyclical component of...

The authors contribute to the debate regarding the reliability of output gap estimates. As an alternative to the Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter, they propose a simple modification of the filter proposed by Hamilton in 2018 that shares its favorable real-time properties, but leads to a more even...

This paper presents a weekly GDP indicator for Switzerland, which addresses the limitations of existing economic activity indicators using alternative high-frequency data created in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The indicator is obtained from a Bayesian mixed-frequency dynamic factor model...

This paper reconciles two widely used trend-cycle decompositions of GDP that give markedly different estimates: the correlated unobserved components model yields output gaps that are small in amplitude, whereas the Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter generates large and persistent cycles. By embedding...

This paper discusses identification, specification, estimation and forecasting for a general class of periodic unobserved components time series models with stochastic trend, seasonal and cycle components. Convenient state space formulations are introduced for exact maximum likelihood...

In this paper, the authors examine how well the Hodrick-Prescott (HP) and the band-pass filter recently proposed by Baxter and King (BK) extract the business-cycle component of macroeconomic time series. The authors assess these filters using two different definitions of the business-cycle...

This paper analyzes the sources of Mexico's economic growth since the 1960s and compares various decompositions of historical growth into its trend and cyclical components. The role of the implied output gaps in the inflationary process is then assessed. Looking ahead, the paper presents...

We propose a simple modification of Hamilton’s (2018) time series filter that yields reliable and economically meaningful real-time output gap estimates. The original filter relies on 8 quarter ahead forecast errors of a simple autoregression of real GDP. While this approach yields a cyclical...