EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

A further note on the three phases of the US business cycle

Allan Layton and Daniel Smith ()

Applied Economics, 2000, vol. 32, issue 9, 1133-1143

Abstract: Using a number of alternative approaches, Sichel (1994) demonstrated evidence supporting the notion that the US business cycle is best characterized as having three distinct phases, viz. contraction, followed by rapid expansion during the early stages of the recovery phase, followed by a period of more normal expansionary growth, with the cycle then repeating itself. This contrasts with the more usual expansion/contraction, two phase characterization but is more in keeping with the original notion of the business cycle as conceived by Burns and Mitchell (1946). Here an alternative approach is employed for shedding light on this issue. Following the original suggestion of Hamilton (1989, 1990, 1991), a simple nonlinear, three phase, regime switching Markov model is compared against its simpler two phase version to determine which version is statistically more consistent with the business cycle historical evidence. The evidence seems to clearly support the three phase characterization and that this characterization yields interesting information on business cycle dynamics which is necessarily missed by the two phase model formulation.

Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/000368400404272 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:applec:v:32:y:2000:i:9:p:1133-1143

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20

DOI: 10.1080/000368400404272

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:taf:applec:v:32:y:2000:i:9:p:1133-1143