We study how total factor productivity (TFP), energy prices, and the Great Moderation are linked. First we estimate a joint stochastic process for the energy price and TFP and establish that until the second quarter of 1982, energy prices negatively affected productivity. This spillover has...

In this paper, we present an evolutionary model of industry dynamics yielding endogenous business cycles with 'Keynesian' features. The model describes an economy composed of firms and consumers/workers. Firms belong to two industries. The first one performs R&D and produces heterogeneous...

This paper proposes a new univariate method to decompose a time series into a trend, a cyclical and a seasonal component: the Trend-Cycle filter (TC filter) and its extension, the Trend-Cycle-Season filter (TCS filter). They can be regarded as extensions of the Hodrick-Prescott filter (HP...

This paper presents a simple new method for measuring `wealth effects' on aggregate consumption. The method exploits the stickiness of consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption `habits') to distinguish between immediate and eventual wealth effects. In U.S. data, we...

This paper proposes a methodology that combines the use of Schwarz's BIC in subset autoregression and subset transfer function identification along with the posterior odds ratio test developed by Poskitt & Tremayne (1987) in the context of testing for Granger-causality and cointegration tests....

This paper uses a frequency domain approach to gain insight into the correlation between survey indicators and year-on-year GDP growth. Using the Baxter-King filter, we split up each series into three components: a short-term, a business cycle (oscillations between 18 and 96 months) and a...

In recent years, it has become increasingly common to estimate New Keynesian Phillips curves with a measure of firms' real marginal cost as the real driving variable. It has been argued that this measure is both theoretically and empirically superior to the traditional output gap. In this paper,...

To gain insights in the current status of the economy, macroeconomic time series are often decomposed into trend, cycle and irregular components. This can be done by nonparametric band-pass filtering methods in the frequency domain or by model-based decompositions based on autoregressive moving...

The Beveridge-Nelson decomposition defines the trend component in terms of the eventual forecast function, as the value the series would take if it were on its long-run path. The paper in-troduces the multistep Beveridge-Nelson decomposition, which arises when the forecast function is obtained...

We apply a recently proposed Bayesian model selection technique, known as stochastic model specification search, for characterising the nature of the trend in macroeconomic time series. We illustrate that the methodology can be quite successfully applied to discriminate between stochastic and...