Detrending and financial cycle facts across G7 countries: mind a spurious medium term!

Yves Schüler

No 2138, Working Paper Series from European Central Bank

Abstract: I show that the detrending of financial variables with the Hodrick and Prescott (1981, 1997) (HP) and band-pass filters leads to spurious cycles. I find that distortions become especially severe when considering medium-term cycles, i.e., cycles that exceed the duration of regular business cycles. In particular, these medium-term filters amplify the variances of cycles of duration around 20 to 30 years up to a factor of 204, completely cancelling out shorter-term fluctuations. This is important because it is common practice, and recommended under Basel III, to extract medium-term cycles using such filters; e.g., the HP filter with a smoothing parameter of 400,000. In addition, I find that financial cycle facts, i.e., differing amplitude, duration, and synchronisation of cycles in financial variables relative to cycles in GDP, are robust. For HP and band-pass filters, differences to GDP become marginal due to spurious cycles. JEL Classification: C10, E32, E44, E58, G01

Keywords: credit-to-GDP gap; detrending; financial cycles; macroprudential policy; spurious cycles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ecb.europa.eu//pub/pdf/scpwps/ecb.wp2138.en.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ecb:ecbwps:20182138

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from European Central Bank 60640 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Official Publications ().