In this paper we examine the empirical features of both the business and financial cycles in Italy. We employ univariate and multivariate trend-cycle decompositions based on unobserved component models. Univariate estimates highlight the different cyclical properties (persistence, duration and...

This book surveys new advances in Markov-switching models with applications to business cycle research and finance. The extensive editors' introduction surveys the existing methods and new results of the last decade. Individual chapters study features of the U.S. and European business cycles,...

The Basel credit-to-GDP gap is the single most popular measure of excessive credit growth and the financial cycle in general. It is based, however, on a purely statistical understanding of excessiveness: Growth is excessive if the credit-to-GDP ratio (i.e. the ratio of credit to nominal GDP) is...

We use European and simulated Hungarian data to search for the univariate one-sided credit-to-GDP gap that predicts systemic banking crises most accurately. The credit-to-GDP gaps under review are optimized along four dimensions: (1) definition of outstanding credit, (2) forecasting method for...

The paper assesses the impact of adding information on financial cycles on the output gap estimates for eight advanced economies using two unobserved components models: a reduced form extended Hodrick-Prescott filter, and a standard semi-structural unobserved components model. To complement...