Abstract
I shall begin by pointing out two limits of this review. Firstly, I shall not deal with non-linear theories of business cycles, i.e. with the attempts to show that simple non-linear equations can generate complicated fluctuations without any resort to exogenous shocks. I shall only focus on the debate that has taken place in the last decade within the so-called Slutzky-Frisch approach, in which fluctuations persist only because the economic system is continually hit by exogenous shocks. In spite of this limitation of the scope a complete review would have produced too long and perhaps not too effective a paper. My topic could therefore be made more precise as: demand and supply theories of the business cycles and the empirical analysis of aggregate variables. In particular, I shall deal with the debate which arose with the works published at the beginning of the eighties, in which the traditional decomposition of macroeconomic time series into a permanent and a transitory component was systematically questioned.
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Lippi, M. (1994). Theory and Measurement of Economic Cycles: a Recent Debate. In: Baldassarri, M., Annunziato, P. (eds) Is the Economic Cycle Still Alive?. Central Issues in Contemporary Economic Theory and Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23183-6_2
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