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Working Paper
Asymmetric persistence in GDP? A deeper look at depth
If economic time series behave asymmetrically, then an interpretation of economic fluctuations based on linear time series models could be misleading. Beaudry and Koop (1993) recently argued that for post war U.S. GDP data there exists a statistically significant difference in persistence between negative and positive shocks. Their finding, if true, would be quite interesting since it would bring a new perspective to the literature on business cycle, which has been dominated by two conflicting views: the trend-reverting view of Blanchard (1981) and the permanent view of Campbell and Mankiw ...
Working Paper
Measuring business cycle features
Since the extensive work by Burns and Mitchell (1947), many economists have interpreted economic fluctuations in terms of business cycle phases. Given this, we argue that in addition to usual model selection criteria currently used in the profession, the adequacy of a univariate macroeconomic time series model should be based on its ability to replicate two most important business cycle features of the U.S. data--duration and amplitude. We propose a number of checks for whether univariate statistical models generate business cycle features observed in US GDP and find that many popular ...