This paper presents business cycle stylized facts for the US, UK and German economies. We examine whether financial variables (interest rates, stock market price indices, dividend yields and monetary aggregates) predict economic activity over the business cycle, and we investigate the nature of...

This paper investigates the nature of nonlinearities in the monetary policy rule of the US Federal Reserve (Fed) using the flexible approach to nonlinear inference. We find that while there is significant evidence of nonlinearity for the period to 1979, there is little such evidence for the...

This paper models UK stock market returns in a smooth transition regression (STR) framework. We employ a variety of financial and macroeconomic series that are assumed to influence UK stock returns, namely GDP, interest rates, inflation, money supply and US stock prices. We estimate STR models...

Following on from the work of Birchenhall, Jessen, Osborn & Simpson (1999) on predicting US business cycle regimes we apply the same methodology to construct a one period ahead model of classical business cycle regimes in the UK. Birchenhall et al generated the regime data from the NBER dating...

We provide evidence on the nature of co-movement in monthly US and UK stock returns by investigating time-varying correlations in returns since 1980. There is a marked increase in correlations between these markets around 2000, which we attribute to globalization and model with a time-varying...