Are there Business Cycles beyond GDP? Alternative Measures to GDP at Business Cycle Frequencies

Philip Maschke and Jörg Döpke

VfS Annual Conference 2014 (Hamburg): Evidence-based Economic Policy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: We discuss properties of alternatives or complements to GDP as a measure of welfare at business cycle frequencies. We argue that these figures are not useful to measure the welfare costs of business cycles. First, data is not available at an appropriate quality and frequency. Second, since the suggested time series sometimes correlate negatively with each other composite indices will lead by construction to very low welfare costs of business cycles. Third, cross-section and quasi-panel evidence based on different samples of countries reveals no impact of the stance of the business cycle on some suggested welfare measures.

JEL-codes: D60 E32 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-mac
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Related works:
Journal Article: Are There Business Cycles “beyond GDP”? Alternative Measures to GDP at Business Cycle Frequencies (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc14:100465

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