Measuring Business Cycle: A Modern Perspective

In the first half of this century, special attention was given to two features of the business cycle: the comovement of many individual economic series and the different behavior of the economy during expansions and contractions. Recent theoretical and empirical research has revived interest in each attribute separately and the authors survey this work. Notable empirical contributions are dynamic factor models that have a single common macroeconomic factor and nonlinear regime-switching models of a macroeconomic aggregate. The authors conduct an empirical synthesis that incorporates both of these features. Copyright 1996 by MIT Press.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)