We use National Bank of New Zealand Regional Economic Activity data, to identify and characterise classical business cycle turning points, for New Zealand’s 14 regions and aggregate New Zealand activity. Using Concordance statistic measures, logistic model and GMM estimation methods,...

In this paper we propose a simple model to forecast industrial production in Italy. We show that the forecasts produced using the model outperform some popular forecasts as well as those stemming from a trading days- and outlier-robust ARIMA model used as a benchmark. We show that the use of...

This paper proposes a new univariate method to decompose a time series into a trend, a cyclical and a seasonal component: the Trend-Cycle filter (TC filter) and its extension, the Trend-Cycle-Season filter (TCS filter). They can be regarded as extensions of the Hodrick-Prescott filter (HP...

This paper introduces a new open source Gauss library to estimate Multivariate Hidden Markov Models (HMM) in their simpler specification. These new programs are based upon the works of Hamilton (1994) and Krolzig (1998) and allow assessment of models with 2, 3 or 4 states through classical...

We analyse the evolution of the business cycle in the accession countries, after a careful examination of the seasonal properties of the available series and the required modification of the cycle dating procedures. We then focus on the degree of cyclical concordance within the group of...

Although nonlinearity is the rule in economic theory, nonlinearity tends to make life difficult for econometricians. While there have been many advances in nonlinear econometrics in recent years, some problems produced by nonlinearity remain 'skeletons in the closet' in empirical economic...

This paper attempts to carry out a study of relative importance of anticipated and unanticipated external crises for the dynamics of economic growth. The estimations are carried out within a two equation system capturing the possibility of a common shock to external crises and growth. The effect...

This paper explores the relationship between obesity and economic conditions in Finland, using individual microdata from 1978 to 2002. The results reveal that an improvement in regional economic conditions measured by the employment-to-population ratio produces a decrease in obesity over the...

A través del estudio de la dispersión entre las diferentes tasas de desempleo, el artículo comienza confirmando que existe un leve pero cierto proceso de convergencia. A partir de este punto se pretende cuantificar en que medida la evolución cíclica del desempleo dentro de cada uno de los...

Shocks to investment-specific technology have been identified as a main source of U.S. aggregate output volatility. In this paper we assess the contribution of these shocks to the volatility of labor market variables, namely, unemployment, vacancies, tightness and the job-finding rate. Thus, our...