This paper attempts to add to the understanding of changes in the magnitude of business cycle fluctuations by examining disaggregated employment data. Specifically, we use a stochastic variance approach on monthly employment data for the 1946-1996 period to highlight two stylized facts of...

In this paper, the authors propose a measure of underlying inflation for Canada obtained from estimating a monthly factor model on individual components of the CPI. This measure, labelled the common component of CPI, has intuitive appeal and a number of interesting features. In particular, it is...

Any non-stationary series can be decomposed into permanent (or "trend") and transitory (or "cycle") components. Typically some atheoretic pre-filtering procedure is applied to extract the permanent component. This paper argues that analysis of the fundamental underlying stationary economic...

This paper surveys both the theoretical and empirical economics literatures on nonlinearity, complex dynamics, and chaos. Unlike earlier survey papers, this one is written for professional researchers in the area and assumes relevant mathematical background. Unsolved problems and unresolved...

Grandmont (1985) found that the parameter space of the most classical dynamic general-equilibrium macroeconomic models are stratified into an infinite number of subsets supporting an infinite number of different kinds of dynamics, from monotonic stability at one extreme to chaos at the other...

This paper studies identification in linear rational expectations models with news shocks. We show that news-driven models and indeterminate equilibrium economies with i.i.d. fundamentals are observationally equivalent. This finding calls for carefully designing empirical investigations of news...

Spectral analysis has had limited applications in cliometrics to date. In this paper, it is used to determine, through international comparisons, the frequency of GDP series in the long run. A reminder of the spectral methodology (I) is followed by successive examinations of the series chosen,...

This note points out a hitherto unrecognised identification issue in a class of rational expectations (RE) models with news shocks. We show that different degrees of anticipation (information flows) have strikingly different implications for the identifiability of the underlying structural...

This paper analyses features of 28 provincial growth-cycles in China’s economy from March 1989 to July 2009. We study the multivariate synchronization of provincial cycles and the selection of the number of cycles phases’ by means of panel Markov-switching models. We obtain evidence that...

The Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter is a commonly used method, particularly in potential output studies. However its suitability depends on a number of conditions. Very small open economies do not satisfy these as their macroeconomic series exhibit pronounced trends, large fluctuations and...