This paper explores the existence of a bounce-back effect in inventory investment using the European Commission opinion survey on stocks of finished products in manufacturing and retail trade sectors for France, Germany and a European aggregate, from 1985q1 to 2011q4. Our empirical findings...

Much has been written about why economists failed to predict the latest financial and real crisis. Reading the recent literature, it seems that the crisis was so obvious that economists must have been blind when looking at data not to see it coming. In this paper, we analyze whether such claims...

Since the 1950s, beginning with Gerschenkron’s classic article, a great number of studies have examined Italy’s economic growth in the post-Unification period; and the quantitative evidence has been much improved, particularly by Fenoaltea. However, the cyclical variability of the Italian...

By using the X-12-ARIMA procedure and the HP filter (lambda = 1 096) with end-of-sample correction (St. Amant and van Norden, 1997; Sarabia, 2010), we identified the growth cycles and estimated the potential output for the Mexican economy (1980.1- 2013.4). We found that: a) there have been six...

The persistent current phase of negative growth has already triggered the awakening of long wave theories. Although long waves are obvious, even with a simple visual observation of the history of the data, doubts as to their existence are expressed by a variety of different theoretical and...

This paper examines the frequency-domain implications of the serial correlation common feature in order to evaluate its merits as an indicator of common business cycles among economic variables. It is shown that the presence of the serial correlation common feature in the first differences of a...

This work examines the presence of unobserved components in the time series of Total Factor Productivity, which is an idea central to modern Macroeconomics. The main approaches in both the study of economic growth and the study of business cycles rely on certain properties of the different...

Maravall and del Río (2001), analized the time aggregation properties of the Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter, which decomposes a time series into trend and cycle, for the case of annual, quarterly, and monthly data, and showed that aggregation of the disaggregate component cannot be obtained as...

The paper contains some implications for applied econometric research. Two important ones are, first, that invertible models, such as AR or VAR models, cannot in general be used to model seasonally adjusted or detrended data. The second one is that to look at the business cycle in detrended...

This article is an attempt to understand the causal factors behind fluctuations in aggregate output. We find an absence of bidirectional causality between the gross domestic product residual and the gross domestic capital formation residual as well as between the GDP residual and the residual of...