Time Series Properties of the German Monthly Production Index

The production index is an important indicator for assessing the cyclical state of the economy. Unfortunately, the monthly time series is contaminated by many noisy components like seasonal variations, calendar and vacation effects. Only part of those nuisance components are explicitly considered in the seasonal adjustment procedures used by statistical agencies. In this paper, we propose a more flexible specification for the seasonal and working day effects and introduce an indicator for the summer vacations effect. We allow for time-varying parameters and show that the resulting Unobserved Components Model delivers more reliable results for the adjusted series.production index, seasonal adjustment, working day effect, business cycles, unobserved components models

Input Demand and the Short- and Long-Run Employment Thresholds. An Empirical Analysis for the German Manufacturing Sector

The concept of the "employment threshold" plays an important role in the public discussion of unemployment. The employment threshol d is defined as that growth rate of output which is necessary to keep employment constant despite the continuous rise in labour productivity. It is related to the Okun coefficient which describes the relationship between the changes of output and unemploy ment. Many contributions to this debate give the impression that the employment threshold is more or less a structural characteristic which remains constant over time. In this paper we derive short- and long-run employment thresholds from an input demand sy stem and show empirically that they depend on factor prices. A moderate wage policy leads to a reduction of the output growth which is necessary for an increase in employment.Okun's Law, employment threshold, productivity

Labour Market Institutions and Employment Thresholds. An International Comparison

This paper deals with the effects to labour market institutions on labour market performance. We analyse the employment threshold (the minimum growth rate necessaryto keep employment constant) which is an indicator for the labour intensity of production. We show for 17 OECD countries for the period 1971 to 2002 that the strictness of employment protection, the extent of wage bargaining co-ordination and the tax wedge reduce the labour intensity of production and raise the employment threshold.Employment protection, labour market institutions, labour demand, internationaln comparison.

Labour Market Institutions and Unemployment. An International Comparison

This paper deals with the effects of labour market institutions on unemployment in a panel of 19 OECD countries for the period 1960 to 2000. In contrast to many other studies, we use long time series and analyze cyclically adjusted trend values of the unemployment rate. Our novel contribution is the estimation of panel models where we allow for heterogeneous effects of institutions on unemployment. Our main results are that on the average a tighter employment protection, a higher tax burden on labour income and a more generous unemployment insurance system increase, whereas a higher centralization of wage negotiations decreases unemployment. The strength of the effects differs considerably between countries.employment protection, labour market institutions, unemployment, international comparison

Estimating the Output Gap Using Business Survey Data - A Bivariate Structural Time Series Model for the German Economy

This paper deals with the estimation of the output gap. We use uni- and bivariate unobserved components models in order to decompose the observed German GDP-series into trend, cycle and seasonal components. The results show that using the ifo business assessment variable as an indicator for the cycle the estimation of the output gap is much more precise and out-of-sample forecasts exhibit smaller prediction errors.Output gap, unobserved component models, survey data

Time Series Properties of the German Monthly Production Index

The production index is an important indicator for assessing the cyclical state of the economy. Unfortunately, the monthly time series is contaminated by many noisy components like seasonal variations, calendar and vacation effects. Only part of those nuisance components are explicitly considered in the seasonal adjustment procedures used by statistical agencies. In this paper, we propose a more flexible specification for the seasonal and working day effects and introduce an indicator for the summer vacations effect. We allow for time-varying parameters and show that the resulting Unobserved Components Model delivers more reliable results for the adjusted series

Labour Market Institutions and the Employment Intensity of Output Growth. An International Comparison

This paper deals with the effects of labour market institutions on labour market performance. We analyse as an indicator for the labour intensity of output growth the employment threshold (the minimum growth rate of output necessary to keep employment constant). We show for a sample of 17 OECD countries for the period 1971 to 2002 that the strictness of employment protection raises the employment threshold in all econometric specifications. A higher wage bargaining coordination and a higher tax wedge reduce also the labour intensity of production, although the effects are not significant in all econometric specifications.employment protection, labour market institutions, labour demand, international comparison, employment threshold

Why we should use high values for the smoothing parameter of the Hodrick-Prescott filter

The HP filter is the most popular filter for extracting the trend and cycle components from an observed time series. Many researchers consider the smoothing parameter lambda = 1600 as something like an universal constant. It is well known that the HP filter is an optimal filter under some restrictive assumptions, especially that the cycle is white noise. In this paper we show that one gets a good approximation of the optimal Wiener-Kolmogorov filter for autocorrelated cycle components by using the HP filter with a much higher smoothing parameter than commonly used. In addition, a new method - based on the properties of the differences of the estimated trend - is proposed for the selection of the smoothing parameter

Trend and Cycles in U.S. Real GDP

In this paper an Unobserved Components Model is employed to decompose U.S. real GDP into trend and cycle components. The main findings are that there exist three cycles with a period of about two, five and 13 years, respectively, and that the long-run development during the last 50 years can be represented by a segmented linear trend with a break in the drift rate in the early seventies. A further result is a remarkable decrease in the volatility of the cycle component and the recursive residuals over the last two decades

Unoberserved Components Models for Quarterly German GDP

In this paper, an Unobserved Components Model is employed to decompose German real GDP into the trend, cycle and seasonal components and the working day effect. The most important findings are: 1) The growth rate of potential output declined from 4.2 per cent in the sixties to 1.4 per cent at the end of the nineties of the last century. 2) The business cycle is comprised of two subcycles with a period of about four and eight years, respectively. 3) The seasonal pattern is not constant over time and the number of working days contribute significantly to the short-term variability of output