Identifying Business Cycle Turning Points with Sequential Monte Carlo Methods

We apply sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) to the detection of turning points in the business cycle and to the evaluation of useful statistics employed in business cycle analysis. The proposed nonlinear filtering method is very useful for sequentially estimating the latent variables and the parameters of nonlinear and non-Gaussian time-series models, such as the Markov-switching (MS) models studied in this work. We show how to combine SMC with Monte Carlo Markov Chain for estimating time series models with MS latent factors. We illustrate the effectiveness of the methodology and measure, in a full Bayesian and realtime context, the ability of a pool of MS models to identify turning points in the European economic activity. We also compare our results with the business cycle datation existing in the literature and provide a sequential evaluation of the forecast accuracy of the competing MS models.