TY  - JOUR
AU  - Baxter,Marianne
AU  - King,Robert G.
TI  - Measuring Business Cycles Approximate Band-Pass Filters for Economic    Time Series
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 5022
PY  - 1995
Y2  - February 1995
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5022
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5022.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Marianne Baxter
Department of Economics
Boston University
270 Bay State Road
Boston, MA  02215
Tel: 617/353-2417
Fax: 617/353-4449
E-Mail: mbaxter@bu.edu

Robert King
Department of Economics
Boston University
270 Bay State Road
Boston, MA  02215
Tel: 617/353-5941
E-Mail: rking@bu.edu
AB  - This paper develops a set of approximate band-pass filters designed for use in a wide range of economic applications.  In particular, we design and implement a specific band-pass filter which isolates business-cycle fluctuations in macroeconomic time series. This filter was designed to isolate fluctuations in the data which persist for periods of two through eight years.  This filter also 'detrends' the data, in the sense that it will render stationary time series that are integrated of order two or less, or that contain deterministic time trends.  We apply our filter to several of the key macroeconomic time series, and describe the picture of the U.S. postwar business cycle that emerges from our analysis.  We also provide detailed comparisons with several alternative detrending methods.
ER  -