This contribution investigates the business cycles of Switzerland compared to its five neighboring countries Germany, Austria, Italy, France and Liechtenstein. In contrast to the widespread notion of small countries "importing" the business cycle from bigger neighbors, it is shown that the real...

The production index is an important indicator for assessing the cyclical state of the economy. Unfortunately, the monthly time series is contaminated by many noisy components like seasonal variations, calendar and vacation effects. Only part of those nuisance components are explicitly...

The Spanish regions are facing a severe recession caused by the international financial crisis that has overlapped with the correction that had been recorded in the property market, which has led to a sharp drop in economic activity and a rapid destruction process employment. In these...

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...

This paper proposes comprehensive measures of the Latin American business cycle that help to infer the expected deepness of recessions, and strength of expansions, as they unfold in real time. These measures are based on the largest country economies in the region by accounting for intrinsic...

Hamilton (2018) argues that one should never use the Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter to detrend economic time series and proposes an alternative approach. This comment reconsiders Hamilton's case against the HP filter, emphasizing two simple points. First, in the empirical example Hamilton...

Although the share of service sector in Côte d’Ivoire’s real GDP is higher than other sectors, it is widely recognized that the Ivorian economy is mainly based on agricultural sector and thus the fluctuations in this ‘motor’ sector could have a huge impact on the growth process of the...

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...

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 hypothe- ses. We...