This paper investigates the role of domestic and external factors in explaining business cycle and international trade developments in fifteen emerging market economies. Results from signrestricted VARs show that developments in real output, inflation, real exchange rates and international trade...

In Denmark official quarterly national accounts are only available for the period since 1977. The paper constructs a set of summary non-seasonally adjusted quarterly national accounts for Denmark for 1948-2010 in current and constant prices as well as a set of other key quarterly macroeconomic...

This paper explores empirically the role of noisy information in cyclical developments and aims at separating fluctuations that are due to genuine changes in fundamentals from those due to temporary animal spirits or expectational errors (noise shocks). Exploiting the fact that the...

DSGE (Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium) models are the common workhorse of modern macroeconomic theory. Whereas story-telling and policy analysis were in the forefront of applications since its inception, the forecasting perspective of DSGE models is only recently topical. In this study,...

We estimate output growth rate spectra for 58 countries. The spectra exhibit diverse shapes. To study the sources of this diversity, we estimate the short-run, business cycle, and long-run frequency components of the sampled series. For most OECD countries the bulk of the spectral mass is in the...

Business cycles may be defined or measured by parametrizing detrending filters to maximize the ability of a business-cycle model to match the moments of the remaining cycles. Thus a theory can be used to guide cycle measurement. We present two applications to U.S. postwar data. In the first...

This paper discusses the paper The Source of Historical Economic Fluctuations: An Analysis using Long-Run Restrictions by Neville Francis and Valerie A. Ramey. It argues that these authors have made great progress both in the precise measurement of labor input as well as determining the effect...

This note shows that German real GDP follows a trend-stationary process. Both tests which have trend-stationarity as the alternative hypothesis as well as tests that have it under the null hypothesis prefer the trend-stationary model. Explicit consideration of breaks in the trend is not...

This paper characterizes business cycle phenomena in a sample of 22 developed and developing economies using a univariate Markov regime switching approach. It examines the efficacy of this approach for detecting business cycle turning points and for identifying distinct economic regimes for each...

This paper outlines a simple regression-based method to decompose the variance of an aggregate time series into the variance of its components, which is then applied to measure the relative contributions of productivity, hours per worker, and employment to cyclical output growth across a panel...