Consider the problem of smoothing a time series for extracting its low frequency characteristics, collectively called its trend. This paper proposes a competitive, to existing methods, solution in choosing the optimal degree of smoothing based on the distribution of the residuals from the smooth...

In this paper I consider the problem of optimal linear filtering, smoothing and trend extraction for m-period differences of processes with a unit root. Such processes arise naturally in economics and finance, in the form of rates of change (price inflation, economic growth, financial returns)...

Despite decades of research, the parameters of the Phillips curve (old or new) remain uncertain, because their estimation is fraught with endogeneity issues: confounding from supply shocks, unobserved inflation expectations and an unobserved output gap. In this work, we use sequences of past...

Since the 1970s the characteristics of international business cycles have changed and deeper economic integration has modified the features of cross-country comovement. We formally test for correlation shifts in measures of real economic activity and economic/financial integration. In Europe we...

En este documento se propone utilizar la metodología de perfiles coincidentes propuesta por Martínez (2010), con el fin de determinar si un conjunto de indicadores obtenidos de encuestas de opinión y otras fuentes son coincidentes o líderes de los indicadores económicos observables y, que...

The two-dimensional circular structure model by Kauermann, Teuber, and Flaschel (2011) will be extended to estimate more than two time series simultaneously. It will be assumed that the multivariate time series follow a cycle over the time. However, the radius and the angle are allowed to...

This paper offers an insight into the optimality of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and its common monetary policies by evaluating the degree of business cycle synchronisation among the EMU member states with respect to the Eurozone aggregate. Business cycles for each country,...

Various forms of instability can be observed in macroeconomic and financial data including changes in variance, changes in cycle properties, or both. Traditional tests do not allow to distinguish between these different cases. This paper proposes and compares two alternative approaches. The...

Business cycles, the ups and downs observed somewhat simultaneously in numerous macroeconomic variables in an economy and often measured using real GDP, are important and, despite much economic research, still incompletely understood. A method for ex-post dating of the business cycle in the Euro...

In this paper we provide a unified methodology for conducting likelihood-based inference on the unknown parameters of a general class of discrete-time stochastic volatility (SV) models, characterized by both a leverage effect and jumps in returns. Given the nonlinear/non-Gaussian state-space...