The global financial crisis highlighted the impact on macroeconomic outcomes of recurrent events like business and financial cycles, highs and lows in volatility, and crashes and recessions. At the most basic level, such recurrent events can be summarized using binary indicators showing if the...

The paper argues that it is important to realize that the concept of a cycle has rarely been precisely articulated in empirical work and that often researchers are using very different definitions of it. We propose a two-fold classification based upon what series one is measuring a cycle in and...

National accountants treat as consumption all expenditure incurred in purchasing consumer durables and in forming intangible assets such as knowledge, education and good health. The case is made in this paper that the national accounts measures of saving and investment understate both the extent...

There are a plethora of measures of Australia’s international price competitiveness. This article provides a practitioners guide to those series. The currently available measures of international price competitiveness are found to be deficient. A theoretically sound measure is suggested and...

Macroeconometric and financial researchers often use secondary or constructed binary random variables that differ in terms of their statistical properties from the primary random variables used in microeconometric studies. One important difference between primary and secondary binary variables...

Macroeconomics has a long tradition of inspecting and interpreting patterns in graphs of aggregate data. However, the move towards more precise quantification of macroeconomic phenomena has seen academics shift away from a study of turning points, which are a natural and obvious way of...