Measuring and Interpreting Business Cycles. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Measuring and Interpreting Business Cycles

This book consists of three long papers, accompanied by a series of short comments (by Klaus Nesser, Erling Steigum, Danny Quah, Michael Bergman, and Seppo Honkapohja) and an introduction by the editors covering the main themes of the book. It combines a systematic empirical investigation into the characteristics of business cycles with a review of general theories of the patterns and dynamics of cycles.

The first paper, by John Hassler, Torsten Persson, and Paul Soderlind, investigates the patterns over time of business cycles, using data from the remarkable Swedish series dating from 1860 to the present day, and will become a standard reference in the literature on empirical investigations of business cycles. The authors find that there are strong similarities between the patterns of the business cycles of many countries.

The second paper, by Peter Englund, Anders Vredin, and Anders Warne, analyses the dynamics of business cycles, and uses applied econometric analysis to identify different types of exogenous macroeconomic shocks, again using the Swedish data. The authors conclude that both permanent and transitory real shocks have lasting effects on patterns of economic growth.

The third paper, by Jean-Michel Grandmont, has a different emphasis and reviews the theory of endogenous shocks. In this complex and distinguished paper he argues that agents may have self-fulfilling expectations of fluctuations in business activity.

This book combines a systematic empirical investigation into the characteristics of business cycles with a review of general theories of their patterns and dynamics. The authors have provided two empirical studies, using Swedish data for which unusually long data series are available. Both the empirical studies show how to analyse business cycles and to interpret them in the light of one well-established theoretical framework. The book's theoretical paper introduces readers to a different theoretical approach. The authors argue for the role played by shocks and by expectations in creating and exacerbating business cycles. As well as providing an overview of recent work in business cycle research, the book also shows how analytical techniques can be applied to historical data; it thus makes a substantial theoretical and applied contribution to the literature.