Cycle Fluctuations in the U.S. Real GDP and National Income and Product Accounts Aggregates

This article provides a new set of empirical regularities describing the U.S. macroeconomy, focusing on business cycle fluctuations in the real GDP and eleven major aggregates from the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs). Patterns of the cyclical fluctuations are assessed using filtering methodologies that adapt to the properties of the series being studied. We employ a recent dataset that includes the Great Recession caused by the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing recovery. We aim to (1) examine the lead-lag relations via cross-correlations between the aggregate cycle in the U.S. real GDP and the cyclical movements in the eleven major NIPA aggregates; (2) investigate econometrically the inter-linkage between the cyclical component of real GDP and that of each NIPA aggregate by way of the Granger-causality test; and (3) evaluate the capability or the predictive power of each NIPA aggregate to forecast real GDP growth via three forecasting models. Comparisons are made with popular nonparametric HP and Baxter-King (BK) filters. The basic conclusion from the empirical analysis is that the adaptive model-based filters have demonstrated advantages over the commonly used HP and BK filters for business cycle analysis across very diverse economic series from the U.S. national accounts, and the structural time series model using smoothed trend and cycle estimates produced more accurate forecasts than the AR(p) model that forecasts directly using the unfiltered time series.