The Interest in business cycle asymmetry has been steadily increasing over the last fifteen years. Most research has focused on the different behaviour of macro-economic variables during expansions and contractions, which by now is well documented. Recent evidence suggests that such a two-phase...

We construct limiting and small sample distributions of maximum likelihood estimators (mle) from the property that they satisfy the first order condition (foc). The foc relates the mle of the analyzed model to the mle of an encompassing model and shows that the mle of the analyzed model is a...