More than thirty years ago Milton Friedman proposed a "plucking" model of business fluctuations in which output cannot exceed a ceiling level, but will, from time to time, be plucked downward by recession. The model implied that business fluctuations are asymmetric, that recessions have only a...

A decade ago Fama and French (1988) estimated that 40% of variation in stock returns was predictable over horizons of 3-5 years, which they attributed to a mean reverting stationary component in prices. While it has been clear that the Depression and war years exert a strong influence on these...

We develop a Bayesian test for structural change at an unknown changepoint in Markov-switching models. Unlike the usual Bayesian treatment of the unknown changepoint problem in the literature, we cast the problem into a `model selection' framework. This is done by adopting a prior for the shift...

Though Hamilton's (1989) Markov switching model has been widely estimated in various contexts, formal testing for Markov switching is not straightforward. Univariate tests in the classical framework by Hansen (1992) and Garcia (1998) do not reject the linear model for GDP. We present Bayesian...

This paper investigates the relationship between permanent and transitory components of U.S. recessions in an empirical model allowing for business cycle asymmetry. Using a common stochastic trend representation for real GNP and consumption, we divide real GNP into permanent and transitory...