In this paper, an Unobserved Components Model is employed to decompose German real GDP into the trend, cycle and seasonal components and the working day effect. The most important findings are: 1) The growth rate of potential output declined from 4.2 per cent in the sixties to 1.4 per cent at...

The output gap is a key variable of business cycle analysis and policy. Obtaining reliable estimates for it, is very difficult, though. Most real-time estimates are frequently revised over time. The idea of this paper is to use various indicators, for example from business surveys, that (i) were...

The aim of this paper is to analyze how aggregate activity in Lebanon fluctuates with regard to recurrent shocks. The research starts by identifying the Lebanese economic business cycle from the first quarter of 1998 to the fourth quarter of 2015 adopting a statistical method. Furthermore, this...