Using text from 200 million pages of 13,000 US local newspapers and machine learning methods, we construct a 170-year-long measure of economic sentiment at the country and state levels, that expands existing measures in both the time series (by more than a century) and the cross-section. Our...

We outline a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with trend extrapo-lation in asset pricing that we fit to quarterly U.S. macroeconomic time series with Baye-sian techniques. To be more precise, we modify the DSGE model in Smets and Wouters (2007) by incorporating asset traders...

Hamilton (2017) criticises the Hodrick and Prescott (1981, 1997) filter (HP filter) because of three drawbacks (i. spurious cycles, ii. end-of-sample bias, iii. ad hoc assumptions regarding the smoothing parameter) and proposes a regression filter as an alternative. I demonstrate that Hamilton's...

The Basel III framework advises considering a reference indicator at the country level to guide the setting of the countercyclical capital buffer: the credit-to-GDP gap. In this paper, I provide empirical evidence suggesting that the credit-to-GDP gap is subject to spurious medium-term cycles,...

We show that one should not use the one-sided Hodrick-Prescott filter (HP-1s) as the real-time version of the two-sided Hodrick-Prescott filter (HP-2s): First, in terms of the extracted cyclical component, HP-1s fails to remove low-frequency fluctuations to the same extent as HP-2s. Second,...

The Basel III framework advises considering a reference indicator at the country level to guide the setting of the countercyclical capital buffer: the credit-to-GDP gap. In this paper, I provide empirical evidence suggesting that the credit-to-GDP gap is subject to spurious medium-term cycles,...

Hamilton (2018) proposes a regression filter (Hamilton filter) as an alternative to the Hodrick-Prescott filter (HP filter). Using frequency domain analysis, among others, I show that the Hamilton filter improves on the HP filter, because it does not induce spurious cycles and it has a smaller...

We show that one should not use the one-sided Hodrick-Prescott filter (HP-1s) as the real-time version of the two-sided Hodrick-Prescott filter (HP-2s): First, in terms of the extracted cyclical component, HP-1s fails to remove low-frequency fluctuations to the same extent as HP-2s. Second,...

We consider a multivariate unobserved component time series model to disentangle the short-term and medium-term cycle for the G7 countries and the Netherlands using four key macroeconomic and financial time series. The novel aspect of our approach is that we simultaneously decompose the...