How Large Is the Cost of Business Cycles in Developing Countries?

This study measures the cost of business cycles in developing countries. The business‐cycle component of consumption is extracted by employing a detrending filter adjusted for the length of a subject country's business cycles, rather than a standard detrending filter, and the cost of business cycles using the extracted component is extracted. Estimated costs in developing countries based on the adjusted filter are found to be significantly different from those based on the standard filter. Hence, in measuring the costs of business cycles in developing countries, we should be careful about the choice of a detrending filter. The results also indicate the following findings: 1) in developing countries, there is probably more room to improve the cost of non‐business‐cycle fluctuations than that of business‐cycle fluctuations, and 2) the cost of business cycles is not strikingly large, even when it is estimated from a model strongly disfavoring business cycles.     

Forecasting recessions using financial variables: the French case

In this article, we focus on the ability of two financial variables—the yield curve spread and the euro–US dollar exchange rate—to predict French recessions over the period 1979–2010. First, we propose a turning point chronology for the French business cycle based on a classical conception of economic cycles and a non-parametric dating algorithm applied to the real GDP series. Second, static and dynamic probit models are developed and estimated to produce the recession probabilities. In-sample results show that the dynamic specification performs better than the static one and, above all, that the exchange rate has a stronger predictive power than the yield curve. Out-of-sample results finally confirm the predominant role assigned to the exchange rate in predicting the latest recession occurred in 2008.     

On testing for symmetry in business cycles

Business cycle forecasting has become an important part of short and medium term economic planning. Such forecasting, however, is often very intricate, as business cycles are not at all periodic, just recurrent. Furthermore, they often include irregular timing and varying amplitudes. When patterns and relationships are very irregular there are no simple reliable business cycle forecasting procedures. In practice there is, somewhere, a limit for business cycle predictability, and it is often worthwhile to examine empirically the various theoretical regularity assumptions. One important regularity issue concerns the business cycle symmetry assumption. The present paper empirically tests the hypothesis of symmetry around business cycle turning points in some economic time series. Two test procedures are applied. One is based on the analysis of transition probabilities between expansion and recession regimes. The second procedure tests symmetry versus asymmetry through skewness statistics. The analysis is based on detrending through the use of linear deterministic trends as well as by Beveridge-Nelson decompositions.     

Detrending methods and stylized facts of business cycles in Norway – an international comparison

This paper analyses the stylized facts of business cycles in Norway, by comparing different detrending methods. As the choice of the appropriate data transformation depends on the nature of the underlying dynamic properties of the time series, a set of unit root tests are first applied to the data. The detrended data are analysed, both in the time domain and the frequency domain. The evidence suggests that whereas some variables (e.g. consumption and investment) behave consistently procyclically with GDP, for other variables (e.g. real wage and prices), the business cycle properties vary considerably with the detrending methods used. The results are evaluated from a real business cycle perspective, but overall, there is little evidence to support a (supply driven) real business cycle. Symmetries in business cycles are finally analysed by comparing the business cycles in Norway and selected countries. First version received: April 1997 / Final version received: November 1999     

Towards an Understanding of Some Business Cycle Characteristics

For many years economists have debated the 'causes' of business cycles. Very little of this analysis has been closely matched with business cycle characteristics as measured by NBER-type dating methods. After summarising data on business cycle characteristics for a wide variety of countries, the article shows that an extremely simple statistical model of output growth, viz. that it is uncorrelated from month to month or quarter to quarter, produces business cycles that are close to those seen in practice. The demonstration involves the analysis of data simulated from this simple statistical model as well as some analytical work using a standard definition of a recession as being two quarters of negative growth. As well as explaining the average length of a cycle this model also accounts for the asymmetry between the lengths of expansions and contractions through the relative magnitudes of the trend rate of growth of the economy and the standard deviation of the shocks that impinge upon it.     

Empirical Evidence on the Austrian Business Cycle Theory

The Austrian business cycle theory suggests that a monetary shock disturbs relative prices, such as the term structure of interest rates, systematically altering profit rates across economic sectors. Resource use responds to those changes, generating a cyclical pattern of real income. The divergence of the interest rate structure, from the previous and unchanged time preferences, means that the expansion is unsustainable and must end in recession. Quarterly data for eight U.S. business cycles, 1950:1 through 1991:1 are standardized by time period and used to explore business cycle facts and relations between money, interest rates, capacity utilization and income. Results are consistent with the hypotheses of the Austrian theory of a business cycle caused by a monetary shock and propagated by relative price changes.     

Capacity constraints, asymmetries, and the business cycle

We study how an occasionally binding capacity constraint affects the properties of business cycles. A real business cycle model is constructed where production takes place at individual plants and the number of plants operated varies over the cycle. The capacity constraint binds in states where all plants are operated. We derive the aggregate production function for this economy, which turns out to differ from the standard Cobb–Douglas function while retaining its desirable properties. The business cycle features of this one-sector growth model are similar to those of a standard real business cycle model in most respects. Our model does, however, display some properties of actual economies that standard models do not. In particular, business cycles in our model are asymmetric—troughs are deeper on average than peaks are tall. Also, labor's share of income is counter-cyclical, as it is in US data.     

The stylised facts of Australia's business cycle

This paper reassesses the ‘stylised facts’ of Australia's contemporary business cycle, by calculating select moments of the cyclical components in quarterly postwar macroeconomic data. In particular, the robustness of the cross-correlation sample moments to the detrending procedure are considered, using both the Hodrick-Prescott (1980) detrending procedure and the unobserved components model developed by Harvey (1985, 1989). The results presented show that under both detrending methods, the anticipated cross-correlation between output and the important real business cycle variables are supportive of the basic real business cycle model for Australia, with one or two exceptions, the most important of which is the behaviour of the real interest rate.     

中国潜在产出与产出缺口的估算

本文在分析比较了潜在产出的三种估算方法的基础上 ,估算出我国1 978— 2 0 0 2年间的潜在产出、产出缺口和潜在增长率。结果表明 :(1 ) 1 978— 2 0 0 2年间我国的产出缺口出现了波动水平正负交替的古典周期情形 ;(2 ) 1 995年以前 ,产出缺口波动比较剧烈而且频繁 ,1 996年特别是 1 999年以后 ,产出缺口变化较为平缓 ;(3 )从 1 999年开始 ,我国产出缺口扩大的势头明显趋缓 ,但在 2 0 0 2年出现了一些反转迹象 ,这表明 1 998年开始实施的积极财政政策在遏制经济下滑、治理经济衰退方面起到了重要作用 ;(4)根据以消除趋势法和生产函数法估算的潜在产出 ,我们可以推断 1 978— 2 0 0 2年间的平均潜在产出增长率     

Endogenous technical progress,R&D periods and durations of business cycles

How do growth and cycles interact? Endogenous growth and business cycle theories are integrated to explain business cycles over different frequencies, especially at lower frequencies, on the balanced growth path. A new variable-R&;D time period-broadens the concept of intertemporal substitution and determines the durations of the medium and long cycles. As a result, the evolution of technology is separated from short-run shocks. A more promising new invention shrinks the R&;D period since waiting is costly, which pushes up the level of economic activity and causes a boom, while a less promising new invention does the opposite. The level of economic activity in turn affects the near-term growth rate. Thus, a recession is not caused by a negative shock as in the standard real business cycle models, but can be associated with a positive, though lower, growth rate of technology. The results capture the major features of U.S. data in both time and frequency domains.     

Output gap measurement and the New Keynesian Phillips curve for China

The New Keynesian Phillips curve implies that the output gap, the deviation of the actual output from its natural level due to nominal rigidities, drives the dynamics of inflation relative to expected inflation and lagged inflation. This paper exploits the empirical success of the New Keynesian Phillips curve in explaining China's inflation dynamics with a new measure of the output gap. We estimate the output gap using the Bayesian multivariate Beveridge–Nelson decomposition method, based on a multivariate dynamic model featuring distinct interactions among inflation, money, and real output in China. The empirical results using quarterly data spanning 1979–2010 show that the new measure of the output gap outperforms the traditional measures in fitting the New Keynesian Phillips curve. This result provides useful insights for inflation dynamics and monetary policy analysis in China.     

Unemployment,marriage and divorce

In this article, we examine whether the business cycle plays a role in marriage and divorce. We use data on Spain, since the differences between recession and expansion periods across regions are quite pronounced in that country. We find that the unemployment rate is negatively associated with the marriage rate, pointing to a pro-cyclical evolution of marriage; however, the response of the divorce rate to the business cycle is mixed. Results show the existence of different patterns, depending on geography: divorce rates in coastal regions are pro-cyclical, while in inland regions divorces react to unemployment in a counter-cyclical way.     

BUSINESS CYCLE,CURRENCY AND TRADE,REVISITED

This paper provides long‐run historical evidence for the link between business cycle synchronization, trade and the exchange rate regime. Using data from a large number of industrialized countries and a group of Asian economies, we examine this link in three sub‐periods: the first globalization period (1870–1913), the bloc economy period (1915–1959) and the second globalization period (1960–2004). The business cycle is identified as the series of deviates from a Hodrick–Prescott filtered trend. Cyclical turning points are located in the business cycles of our sample of 21 major countries, which enables us to comment on the characteristics of business cycles in the three periods. Cross‐correlations of the cyclical deviates are calculated for all the pairs of the 21 countries examined. It is apparent from casual inspection that the business cycle characteristics and the pattern of cross‐correlations in the bloc economy period are different from those found for the two globalization periods, whereas there is less difference between the two globalization periods. Following the estimations by Frankel and Rose, we relate business cycle synchronization to trade patterns and currency unions. Consequently, we find that European integration was already discernible in terms of business cycle synchronization in the early 1900s and that a similar synchronization was not discernible for Asia.     

Has the structural break slowed down growth rates of stock markets?

In this paper, we use the common structural break test suggested by Bai et al. (1998) to test for a common structural break in the stock prices of the US, the UK, and Japan. On the basis of the structural break, we divide each country's stock price series into sub-samples and investigate whether or not the structural break had slowed down the growth of stock markets. Our main findings are that when stock markets are modelled in a trivariate sense the common structural break turns out to be 1990:02, with the confidence interval including several episodes, such as the asset price bubble when housing prices and stock prices in Japan reached a peak in 1988/1989, the early 1990s recession in the UK, the business cycle peak of July 1990, the August 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the March 1991 business cycle trough. Annual average growth rates suggest that the structural break has slowed down the growth rate of the US, the UK and Japanese stock markets.     

Consequences of Hodrick–Prescott filtering for parameter estimation in a structural model of inventory behaviour

Much work in macroeconomics relies on detrending a time series prior to analysis. A popular method of detrending has been the Hodrick–Prescott (HP) filter. This filter has been widely applied in the Real Business Cycle literature to isolate the behaviour of economic variables at business cycle frequencies and to look at comovements between series over the business cycle. Prior work has shown that the use of this filter can have serious consequences for such analysis, such as inducing spurious correlations, and that a researcher should proceed with caution when applying the filter. Another use of HP filtering has been to achieve stationarity prior to estimation of structural econometric models. Little work has been done concerning the possible effects this method of detrending may have on parameter estimation from such models. Given the problems with the filter noted in the literature, it is likely these effects may be of some consequence to estimation results. Using a common model of inventory behaviour, a simulation study is conducted to assess the impact of using the HP filter for detrending prior to estimation. A comparison will be made to other methods of handling trend to gauge relative performance.     

UK business cycle synchronization with Germany and the US: New evidence from time–frequency domain and structure of economic growth

This article uses a time–space approach to check the UK business cycle synchronization with Germany and the US. As a novelty, we consider the co-movements in terms of economic growth rate structure. In line with the existing studies, we discover that the UK business cycle is more synchronized with the US then with Germany, and that the co-movements have intensified lately. We also show that co-movements are reduced in terms of business cycle structure and are time–frequency-dependent. Finally, we point out that the UK business cycle became more synchronized with the US cycle given the contribution of investments and external balance to the real growth rate.     

Asymmetric impact of monetary surprises on exchange rate

This paper examines the asymmetric response of exchange rate to monetary surprises. After controlling the type, direction and origin of the news as well as business cycle phase, a new asymmetry is found in the response of the exchange rate to news surprises. In specific, the US Dollar depreciates against major currencies as the response to the negative monetary surprises in the 2001 recession, while the Dollar appreciates responding to similar negative monetary surprises during the 2008 recession. The paper further explores possible causes and finds that time-varying status of the currency with higher financial returns may contribute to the new asymmetry.     

What is a recession?: A reprise

This paper draws its title from a paper written over 35 years ago by Geoffrey H. Moore (1967). Why the need for a reprise? First, there would appear currently to be somewhat diverging views as to what properly constitutes a recession. Second, largely as a result of this, in many countries other than the US, there does not exist a single, widely accepted business cycle chronology for the country in question. This paper will argue that, in addition to output, there are other important aspects to aggregate economic activity that need to be taken into account in determining the business cycle, viz., income, sales and employment. As such, our perspective would seem to be at odds with the apparent position taken by some other recent commentators on this issue who argue that GDP is all that is needed to represent a country's business cycle. We will also argue against using the currently popular ‘two negative quarterly growth rate’ rule in dating the onset of a recession.     

A Nonlinear Approach for Modeling and Forecasting US Business Cycles

The purpose of this paper is to provide a complete evaluation of four regime-switching models by checking their performance in detecting US business cycle turning points, in replicating US business cycle features and in forecasting US GDP growth rate. Both individual and combined forecasts are considered. Results indicate that while the Markov-switching model succeeded in replicating all the NBER peak and trough dates without an extra-cycle detection, it seems to be outperformed by the Bounce-back model in term of the delay time to a correct alarm. Concerning business cycle features characterization, none of the competing models dominates over all the features. The performance of the Markov-switching and bounce back models in detecting turning points was not translated into an improved business cycle feature characterization since they are outperformed by the Floor and Ceiling model. The forecast performance of the considered models varies across regimes and across forecast horizons. That is, the model performing best in an expansion period is not necessarily the same in a recession period and similarly for the forecast horizons. Finally, combining such individual forecasts generally leads to increased forecast accuracy especially for h=1.     

Liability dollarization,exchange market pressure and fear of floating: empirical evidence for Turkey

US and British unemployment rates for non–white males and females are compared over the period 1970–1998. Whereas US rates remained fairly steady, there was a marked increase in British non–white unemployment rates. The reasons for this poor performance, relative to the good performance of US non–whites are explored. It is shown that non–white unemployment behaves in different ways across the two countries. For example, British rates rise faster in a recession than white rates, whereas US rates appear not to follow this British hypercyclical pattern.