IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/phsmap/v333y2004icp325-334.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Empirical results on the size distribution of business cycle phases

Author

Listed:
  • Di Guilmi, Corrado
  • Gaffeo, Edoardo
  • Gallegati, Mauro

Abstract

We study the size distribution of business cycles phases, that is expansions and contractions, for a sample of 16 industrialized countries over 120 years. We find that the best-fitting distribution for both expansions and contractions is Weibull, meaning that business cycles possess a characteristic scale. Furthermore, we discuss how parameters’ estimates can be used to make inference on the probability a typical episode ends, that is on what economists call turning points.

Suggested Citation

  • Di Guilmi, Corrado & Gaffeo, Edoardo & Gallegati, Mauro, 2004. "Empirical results on the size distribution of business cycle phases," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 333(C), pages 325-334.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:333:y:2004:i:c:p:325-334
    DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2003.10.022
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437103009415
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.physa.2003.10.022?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Gaffeo, Edoardo & Gallegati, Mauro & Giulioni, Gianfranco & Palestrini, Antonio, 2003. "Power laws and macroeconomic fluctuations," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 324(1), pages 408-416.
    2. Sichel, Daniel E, 1991. "Business Cycle Duration Dependence: A Parametric Approach," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 73(2), pages 254-260, May.
    3. Susanto Basu & Alan M. Taylor, 1999. "Business Cycles in International Historical Perspective," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 13(2), pages 45-68, Spring.
    4. Dan Chin & John Geweke & Preston Miller, 2000. "Predicting Turning Points: Technical Paper 2000-3," Working Papers 13337, Congressional Budget Office.
    5. Stanley, Michael H. R. & Buldyrev, Sergey V. & Havlin, Shlomo & Mantegna, Rosario N. & Salinger, Michael A. & Eugene Stanley, H., 1995. "Zipf plots and the size distribution of firms," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 49(4), pages 453-457, October.
    6. Stephen K. McNees, 1992. "How large are economic forecast errors?," New England Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, issue Jul, pages 25-42.
    7. Romer, Christina D, 1986. "Is the Stabilization of the Postwar Economy a Figment of the Data?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 76(3), pages 314-334, June.
    8. Margaret M. McConnell & Patricia C. Mosser & Gabriel Perez-Quiros, 1999. "A decomposition of the increased stability of GDP growth," Current Issues in Economics and Finance, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, vol. 5(Aug).
    9. Youngki Lee & Luis A. N. Amaral & David Canning & Martin Meyer & H. Eugene Stanley, 1998. "Universal features in the growth dynamics of complex organizations," Papers cond-mat/9804100, arXiv.org.
    10. Francis X. Diebold & Glenn Rudebusch & Daniel Sichel, 1993. "Further Evidence on Business-Cycle Duration Dependence," NBER Chapters, in: Business Cycles, Indicators, and Forecasting, pages 255-284, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Brock, W A, 1999. "Scaling in Economics: A Reader's Guide," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 8(3), pages 409-446, September.
    12. Ormerod, Paul & Mounfield, Craig, 2001. "Power law distribution of the duration and magnitude of recessions in capitalist economies: breakdown of scaling," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 293(3), pages 573-582.
    13. Christina D. Romer, 1999. "Changes in Business Cycles: Evidence and Explanations," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 13(2), pages 23-44, Spring.
    14. Canning, D. & Amaral, L. A. N. & Lee, Y. & Meyer, M. & Stanley, H. E., 1998. "Scaling the volatility of GDP growth rates," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 60(3), pages 335-341, September.
    15. Neftci, Salih N, 1984. "Are Economic Time Series Asymmetric over the Business Cycle?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 92(2), pages 307-328, April.
    16. Daniel M. Chin & John Geweke & Preston J. Miller, 2000. "Predicting turning points," Staff Report 267, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Grilli, Ruggero & Tedeschi, Gabriele & Gallegati, Mauro, 2014. "Bank interlinkages and macroeconomic stability," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 34(C), pages 72-88.
    2. Gatti, Domenico Delli & Di Guilmi, Corrado & Gallegati, Mauro & Giulioni, Gianfranco, 2007. "Financial Fragility, Industrial Dynamics, And Business Fluctuations In An Agent-Based Model," Macroeconomic Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 11(S1), pages 62-79, November.
    3. Edgardo Bucciarelli & Marcello Silvestri, 2013. "Hyman P. Minsky's unorthodox approach: recent advances in simulation techniques to develop his theoretical assumptions," Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 36(2), pages 299-324.
    4. Campolieti, Michele, 2019. "The durations of recession and prosperity: What distribution do they follow?," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 534(C).
    5. Ruggero Grilli & Gabriele Tedeschi & Mauro Gallegati, 2015. "Markets connectivity and financial contagion," Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination, Springer;Society for Economic Science with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents, vol. 10(2), pages 287-304, October.
    6. Gatti, Domenico Delli & Guilmi, Corrado Di & Gaffeo, Edoardo & Giulioni, Gianfranco & Gallegati, Mauro & Palestrini, Antonio, 2005. "A new approach to business fluctuations: heterogeneous interacting agents, scaling laws and financial fragility," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 56(4), pages 489-512, April.
    7. Neveu, Andre R., 2013. "Fiscal policy and business cycle characteristics in a heterogeneous agent macro model," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 92(C), pages 224-240.
    8. Guilmi, Corrado Di & Gallegati, Mauro & Ormerod, Paul, 2004. "Scaling invariant distributions of firms’ exit in OECD countries," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 334(1), pages 267-273.
    9. Grilli, Ruggero & Tedeschi, Gabriele & Gallegati, Mauro, 2020. "Business fluctuations in a behavioral switching model: Gridlock effects and credit crunch phenomena in financial networks," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 114(C).
    10. Funashima, Yoshito, 2016. "Governmentally amplified output volatility," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 462(C), pages 469-478.
    11. Fabio Clementi & Marco Gallegati & Mauro Gallegati, 2015. "Growth and Cycles of the Italian Economy Since 1861: The New Evidence," Italian Economic Journal: A Continuation of Rivista Italiana degli Economisti and Giornale degli Economisti, Springer;Società Italiana degli Economisti (Italian Economic Association), vol. 1(1), pages 25-59, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Gaffeo, Edoardo & Gallegati, Mauro & Giulioni, Gianfranco & Palestrini, Antonio, 2003. "Power laws and macroeconomic fluctuations," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 324(1), pages 408-416.
    2. Giorgio Fagiolo & Mauro Napoletano & Andrea Roventini, 2008. "Are output growth-rate distributions fat-tailed? some evidence from OECD countries," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 23(5), pages 639-669.
    3. Giovanni Dosi & Marcelo C. Pereira & Maria Enrica Virgillito, 2017. "The footprint of evolutionary processes of learning and selection upon the statistical properties of industrial dynamics," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 26(2), pages 187-210.
    4. Wright, Ian, 2009. "Implicit Microfoundations for Macroeconomics," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 3, pages 1-27.
    5. Stanley, H.E. & Gabaix, Xavier & Gopikrishnan, Parameswaran & Plerou, Vasiliki, 2007. "Economic fluctuations and statistical physics: Quantifying extremely rare and less rare events in finance," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 382(1), pages 286-301.
    6. Carolina Castaldi & Giovanni Dosi, 2007. "The patterns of output growth of firms and countries: new evidence on scale invariances and scale specificities," LEM Papers Series 2007/14, Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy.
    7. Charolina CASTALDI & Giovanni Dosi, 2004. "Income Levels and Income Growth: Some New Cross-Country Evidence and some Interpretative Puzzles," DEGIT Conference Papers c009_038, DEGIT, Dynamics, Economic Growth, and International Trade.
    8. Clements, Michael P & Krolzig, Hans-Martin, 2003. "Business Cycle Asymmetries: Characterization and Testing Based on Markov-Switching Autoregressions," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 21(1), pages 196-211, January.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:333:y:2004:i:c:p:325-334. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/physica-a-statistical-mechpplications/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.