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...

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...

To date, there has been little investigation of the impact of seasonal adjustment on the detection of business cycle expansion and recession regimes. We study this question both analytically and through Monte Carlo simulations. Analytically, we view the occurrence of a single business cycle...

This paper fits hidden Markov switching models to New Zealand GDP data. A primary objective is to better understand the utility of these methods for modelling growth and volatility regimes present in the New Zealand data and their interaction. Properties of the models are developed together with...

This paper develops a new open economy structural VAR model of the New Zealand economy. The model adopts techniques introduced by Cushman and Zha (1997) and Dungey and Pagan (2000) to identify international and domestic shocks and dynamic responses to these shocks in a small open economy. The...

This paper uses the open economy structural VAR model developed in Buckle, Kim, Kirkham, McLellan and Sharma (2002) to evaluate the impact of monetary policy on New Zealand business cycles and inflation variability and the output/ inflation variance trade-off. The model includes a forward-...

In this paper we extend the Stock and Watson's (Leading economic indicators, new approaches and forecasting records, 1991) single-index dynamic factor model in an econometric framework that has the advantage of combining information from real and financial indicators published at different...

Even before the events of the past few years, economists and policy makers were musing about the apparent contradiction between globalization, as it is generally understood, and the seemingly different paths in overall economic activity taken by the emerging and more mature economies of the...

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...

This paper explores the existence of a bounce-back effect in inventory investment using the European Commission opinion survey on stocks of finished products in manufacturing and retail trade sectors for France, Germany and a European aggregate, from 1985q1 to 2011q4. Our empirical findings...