Econometric Methods for Business Cycle Dating

Over time, the reference cycle of an economy is determined by a sequence of non-observable business cycle turning points involving a partition of the time calendar into non-overlapping episodes of expansions and recessions. Dating these turning points helps develop economic analysis and is useful for economic agents, whether policymakers, investors, or academics. Aiming to be transparent and reproducible, determining the reference cycle with statistical frameworks that automatically date turning points from a set of coincident economic indicators has been the source of remarkable advances in this research context. These methods can be classified into different broad sets of categories. Depending on the assumptions made in the data-generating process, the dating methods are parametric and non-parametric. There are two main approaches to dealing with multivariate data sets: average then date and date then average. The former approach focuses on computing a reference series of the aggregate economy, usually by averaging the indicators across the cross-sectional dimension. Then, the global turning points are dated on the aggregate indicator using one of the business cycle dating models available in the literature. The latter approach consists of dating the peaks and troughs in a set of coincident business cycle indicators separately, assessing the reference cycle itself in those periods where the individual turning points cohere. In the early 21st century, literature has shown that future work on dating the reference cycle will require dealing with a set of challenges. First, new tools have become available, which, being increasingly sophisticated, may enlarge the existing academic–practitioner gap. Compiling the codes that implement the dating methods and facilitating their practical implementation may reduce this gap. Second, the pandemic shock hitting worldwide economies led most industrialized countries to record 2020’s most significant fall and the largest rebound in national economic indicators since records began. Under these influential observations, the outcomes of dating methods could misrepresent the actual reference cycle, especially in the case of parametric approaches. Exploring non-parametric approaches, big data sources, and the classification ability offered by machine learning methods could help improve dating analyses’ performance.