مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Short-term analyses in central banks and other policy institutions are intended to provide policy makers, and possibly larger audiences, with assessments of the recent past and current business cycle. There is a long tradition in business cycle analysis of separating periods of contraction from periods of expansion (see Schumpeter, 1954). Policy decisions vary depending on whether the economy is in an expansionary or a recessionary period. Most of the research to date has focused on US data, where the cycle defined by the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) cycle is regarded as the official reference cycle.

There is no authoritative dating of classical business cycles for the Norwegian economy. Norway is characterized by being a small open economy with large exports of energy (gas and oil) goods, and it is not obvious whether Norwegian business cycles are synchronized fully with the cycles of other Scandinavian countries, or with the European or US cycles.

The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, we define classical business cycle turning points for the Norwegian economy for the period 1978Q1–۲۰۱۱Q4, exploring a widely used set of methods. Second, in a real-time out-of-sample forecasting exercise, we study the timeliness and accuracy of the different methods in order to predict the peak and trough of the last recession.