Postwar U.S. Business Cycles: An Empirical Investigation
1997/02/01 by Robert J. Hodrick, Edward C. Prescott · 7,448 citations
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Mathematics · #Aggregate (composite) #Business cycle #Capital (architecture) #Complex Systems and Time Series Analysis #Component (thermodynamics) #Econometrics #Economics #Geography #Macroeconomics #Market Dynamics and Volatility #Mathematics #Monetary Policy and Economic Impact #Monetary economics #Per capita #Secular variation #Series (stratigraphy) #Statistics #Thermodynamics #Variety (cybernetics)
paper · doi:10.2307/2953682
published in Journal of money credit and banking 29(1), 1 (Wiley)
openalex publication_date 1997/02/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Abstract
A study documents some features of aggregate economic fluctuations sometimes referred to as business cycles. The investigation uses quarterly data from the postwar US economy. The fluctuations studied are those that are too rapid to be accounted for by slowly changing demographic and technological factors and changes in the stocks of capital that produce secular growth in output per capita. The study proposes a procedure for representing a times series as the sum of a smoothly varying trend component and a cyclical component. The nature of the comovements of the cyclical components of a variety of macroeconomic time series is documented. It is found that these comovements are very different than the corresponding comovements of the slowly varying trend components.
Citations
Cited by
- Out-of-sample exchange rate predictability with Taylor rule fundamentals
- Revisiting the Minimum Wage—Employment Debate: Throwing Out the Baby with the Bathwater?
- EU Cohesion Policy and Inter‐regional Risk‐sharing: First Evidence and Lessons Learned
- Organization Capital and the Cross‐Section of Expected Returns
- The Pollution Premium
- Developing Donor Relationships: The Role of the Breadth of Giving
- Equity Returns and Business Cycles in Small Open Economies
- Regional house price convergence in Spain during the housing boom
- Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint: Changes in the frequency of criminal incidents during the COVID-19 pandemic
- Poverty convergence clubs
- On Adjusting the Hodrick-Prescott Filter for the Frequency of Observations
- It's (Change in) the (Future) Economy, Stupid: Economic Indicators, the Media, and Public Opinion
- RobustTrend: A Huber Loss with a Combined First and Second Order Difference Regularization for Time Series Trend Filtering
- Economic transition and growth
- Intimate Partner Violence: The Influence of Job Opportunities for Men and Women
- Causes of Failure of the Phillips Curve: Does Tranquillity of Economic Environment Matter?
- Regime Changes and Real-Financial Cycles: Searching Minsky's Hypothesis in a Nonlinear Setting
- Breaks in the Phillips Curve: Evidence From Panel Data
- Decomposing the sales promotion bump accounting for cross-category effects
- Investor sentiment and advertising expenditure
- BASTION: A Bayesian Framework for Trend and Seasonality Decomposition
- Trend-cycle decomposition in the presence of large shocks
- The Impact of Climate Legislation on Trade-Related Carbon Emissions 1996–2018
- Can Large Language Models Execute Parent Orders?
- The geopolitical risk effect on the US renewable energy deployment
- Demographics and real interest rates across countries and over time
- Fused-Lasso Regularized Cholesky Factors of Large Nonstationary Covariance Matrices of Longitudinal Data
- International evidence on business cycle magnitude dependence
- High-Pass Filtering and Gaussian Process Regularization: Stellar Activity Characterization Techniques Applied to the 55 Cancri Planetary System
- Boom and bust in the Estonian real estate market and the role of land tax as a buffer
- Why We Should Use High Values for the Smoothing Parameter of the Hodrick-Prescott Filter
- AIRCC-Clim: a user-friendly tool for generating regional probabilistic climate change scenarios and risk measures
- Systematic risk profiling: Assessing compounding economic risks in developing countries
- Inferring serial correlation with dynamic backgrounds
- Convergence in Sovereign Debt Defaults: Quantifying the Roles of Institutions
- Statistical Factors Principally Driving the Volatility of Australian Stocks Through the Business Cycle
- Adaptive Online Estimation of Piecewise Polynomial Trends
- Joint Linear Trend Recovery Using L1 Regularization
- The impact of UN and US economic sanctions on GDP growth
- Output divergence in fixed exchange rate regimes
- Populists and fiscal policy: The case of Poland
- Forecasting CPI inflation under economic policy and geopolitical uncertainties
- The Economic Performance Index (EPI)
- High-dimensional Time Series Prediction with Missing Values
- Learning to Generate Diverse Dance Motions with Transformer
- A Functional Hodrick Prescott Filter
- Investor Experiences and International Capital Flows
- A Synthetic Business Cycle Approach to Counterfactual Analysis with Nonstationary Macroeconomic Data
- A consistent estimator of the smoothing operator in the functional Hodrick-Prescott filter
- The Impact of Climatic Factors on Respiratory Pharmaceutical Demand: A Comparison of Forecasting Models for Greece
- OnlineSTL: Scaling Time Series Decomposition by 100x
- The Economic Impact of Low- and High-Frequency Temperature Changes
- Wasserstein total variation filtering
- The Africa-Dummy: Gone with the Millennium?
- A Varying Coefficient Model for Assessing the Returns to Growth to Account for Poverty and Inequality
- Identification and analysis of industry cycles
- Learning from History: Volatility and Financial Crises
- How to make a super-model: professional incentives and the birth of contemporary macroeconomics
- Reduction of time-resolved space-based CCD photometry developed for MOST Fabry Imaging data
- Pre-Brexit
- South Africa's Inflation: Monetary or Fiscal
- Carrots, Sticks, and Broken Windows
- Which cryptocurrency data sources should scholars use?
- Going to Extremes: Politics after Financial Crises, 1870-2014
- Oil and the Macroeconomy Since the 1970s
- Up in the Air: When Homes Meet the Web of Things
- Forecasting: theory and practice
- A unit root model for trending time-series energy variables
- The hysteresis of the unemployment rate in a middle income country: the case of Morocco
- What information is most relevant for estimating output gaps in emerging economies?
- Real-time torque prediction for ultrasonic motors using an attention-based BiLSTM model and improved differential evolution algorithm
- Club convergence of house prices: Evidence from China’s ten key cities
- Endogenous cyclical corporate tax burden in China: The role of tax quotas and growth targets
- The NAIRU in Theory and Practice
- Are some populations resilient to recessions? Economic fluctuations and mortality during a period of economic decline and recovery in Finland. [europepmc]
- Economic Downturns, Retirement and Long-Term Cognitive Function Among Older Americans. [europepmc]
- Impacts of El Niño-Southern Oscillation on the wheat market: A global dynamic analysis. [europepmc]
- Business cycles' correlation and systemic risk of the Japanese supplier-customer network. [europepmc]
- Automated Quality Control for Sensor Based Symptom Measurement Performed Outside the Lab. [europepmc]
- Influenza D Virus: Serological Evidence in the Italian Population from 2005 to 2017. [europepmc]
- Effect of Free Healthcare Policy for Children under Five Years Old on the Incidence of Reported Malaria Cases in Burkina Faso by Bayesian Modelling: "Not only the Ears but also the Head of the Hippopotamus". [europepmc]
- Will the Economic Recession Inhibit the Out-of-Pocket Payment Willingness for Health Care? [europepmc]
- Somehow I always end up alone: COVID-19, social isolation and crime in Queensland, Australia. [europepmc]
- Global Trends in Child Obesity: Are Figures Converging? [europepmc]
- Clusters in the Spread of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence From the G20 Countries. [europepmc]
- On the Network Transmission Mechanisms of Disease-Specific Healthcare Expenditure Spillovers: Evidence from the Connectedness Network Analyses. [europepmc]
- Disparities in the Evolution of the COVID-19 Pandemic between Spanish Provinces. [europepmc]
- GDP Forecasting: Machine Learning, Linear or Autoregression? [europepmc]
- Scrutinizing Pork Price Volatility in the European Union over the Last Decade. [europepmc]
- What is the short-term outlook for the EU's natural gas demand? Individual differences and general trends based on monthly forecasts. [europepmc]
- Synchronization and cyclicality of social spending in economic crises. [europepmc]
- Environmental pollution and economic growth: Evidence of SO 2 emissions and GDP in China. [europepmc]
- The Impact of Heavy Rainfall Variability on Fertilizer Application Rates: Evidence from Maize Farmers in China. [europepmc]
- Which return regime induces overconfidence behavior? Artificial intelligence and a nonlinear approach. [europepmc]
- Influenza pandemics and macroeconomic fluctuations 1871-2016. [europepmc]
- Economic Cycles and Entry into Parenthood: Is the Association Changing and Does it Affect Macro-Level Trends? Micro-Level Hazard and Simulation Models of Belgian Fertility Trends, 1960-2010. [europepmc]
- Predicting the epidemiological trend of acute hemorrhagic conjunctivitis in China using Bayesian structural time-series model. [europepmc]
- Estimating effective population size trajectories from time-series identity-by-descent segments. [europepmc]
- Economic consequences of spatial variation and temporal variability of climate change. [europepmc]
Related