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...

In this paper, we review the most common specifications of discrete-time stochastic volatility (SV) models and illustrate the major principles of corresponding Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) based statistical inference. We provide a hands-on ap proach which is easily implemented in empirical...

This paper tests the expectations hypothesis (EH) of the term structure of interest rates in US data, using spectral regression techniques that allow us to consider different frequency bands. We find a positive relation between the term spread and the change in the long-term interest rate in a...

Market growth is driven by product innovation. Beyond functional satiation the marginal utility of product performance and variety decreases. We argue that social comparisons underlying innovation diffusion results in consumer motivations for upward assimilation toward the behavior of better...

We adopt an unobserved components time series model to extract financial cycles for the United States and the five largest euro area countries over the period 1970 to 2014. We find that credit, the credit-to-GDP ratio and house prices have medium-term cycles which share a few common statistical...

We develop a multivariate unobserved components model to extract business cycle and financial cycle indicators from a panel of economic and financial time series of four large developed economies. Our model is flexible and allows for the inclusion of cycle components in different selections of...

This paper examines the business cycle linkages that propagate industry-specific business cycle shocks throughout the economy in a way that (sometimes) generates aggregated cycles. The transmission of sectoral business cycles is modelled through a multivariate Markov-switching model, which is...

In this article we model the log of the U.S. and the U.K. real oil prices in terms of fractionally integrated processes with a mean shift. We use different versions of the tests of Robinson (1994), which have standard null and local limit distributions. The results indicate that if we model the...