 The HP-Filter in Cross-Country ComparisonsNo 32, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics Abstract: Many empirical studies have applied the Hodrick-Prescott fllter in cross- country comparisons of business cycle fluctuations. The Hodrick-Prescott filter involves the smoothing parameter, , and standard practise in the literature is to set this parameter equal to 1600 (in quarterly data) for all countries. We show that this choice might distort the results when the cyclical component is highly serially correlated, and that care should be taken in checking if the results are "reasonable" in the light of common wisdom. For example, for Spanish data we show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the results imply that the Spanish cycle is very smooth and that the period of 1975-1985 was one of macroeconomic tranquility. We propose to recast the HP-filter as a constrained minimization problem which selects endogenously a value of that imposes cross-country consistency of the imposed constraint. Our proposed method is easy to apply, retains all the virtues of the standard HP-filter. When applied to Spanish data the results imply a return to conventional wisdom and we found results in line with economic historian's views. We also examine data for a number of OECD countries and find that, with the exception of Spain, Italy and Japan, the standard choice of = 1600 is sensible. Keywords: Business cycles; cross-country comparisons; macroeconomic volatility (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bge:wpaper:32 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.