 Towards an Understanding of Some Business Cycle CharacteristicsAustralian Economic Review, 1997, vol. 30, issue 1, 1-15 Abstract: For many years economists have debated the ‘causes’ of business cycles. Very little of this analysis has been closely matched with business cycle characteristics as measured by NBER‐type dating methods. After summarising data on business cycle characteristics for a wide variety of countries, the article shows that an extremely simple statistical model of output growth, viz. that it is uncorrelated from month to month or quarter to quarter, produces business cycles that are close to those seen in practice. The demonstration involves the analysis of data simulated from this simple statistical model as well as some analytical work using a standard definition of a recession as being two quarters of negative growth. As well as explaining the average length of a cycle this model also accounts for the asymmetry between the lengths of expansions and contractions through the relative magnitudes of the trend rate of growth of the economy and the standard deviation of the shocks that impinge upon it. Date: 1997 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ausecr:v:30:y:1997:i:1:p:1-15 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Australian Economic Review is currently edited by John de New, Viet Hoang Nguyen and Susan Méndez More articles in Australian Economic Review from The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research Contact information at EDIRC. |
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