The Typical Spectral Shape of an Economic Variable: A Visual Guide with 100 Examples

Carlos A. Medel ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Granger (1966) describes how the spectral shape of an economic variable concentrates spectral mass at low frequencies, declining smoothly as frequency increases. Despite a discussion about how to assess robustness of his results, the empirical exercise focused on the evidence obtained from a handful of series. In this paper, I focus on a broad range of economic variables to investigate their spectral shape. Hence, through different examples taken from both actual and simulated series, I provide an intuition of the typical spectral shape of a wide range of economic variables and the impact of their typical treatments. After performing 100 different exercises, the results show that Granger's assertion holds more often than not. I also confirm that the basic shape holds for a number of transformations, time aggregations, series' anomalies, variables of the real economy, and also, but to a lesser extent, financial variables. Especially fuzzy cases are those that exhibit some degree of transition to a different regime, as are those estimated with a very short bandwidth.

Keywords: Frequency domain; spectral analysis; nonparametric econometrics; busness cylces (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A20 C02 C14 E32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-02-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/53584/1/MPRA_paper_53584.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Typical Spectral Shape of An Economic Variable: A Visual Guide with 100 Examples (2014)
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:pra:mprapa:53584

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().