Seite - 125 - in The Austrian Business Cycle in the European Context

125 9. Comparing results with earlier studies on the Austrian business cycle In this chapter. the above findings are compared with those of earlier studies on the Austrian business cycle. Some of them relate to specific sectors, some others only to the business cycle of the whole Austrian economy. There are several studies on this topic, using different methods and reference series. Only few of them fo- cus on an explicit dating of the Austrian business cycle and none of them applies such dating on a sectoral level. Therefore no ear- lier study can be compared directly with the findings of the pre- sent one. Even their time horizon often differs substantially. Despite this problem, the most relevant studies on the subject are compared with the results of this study in order to check the ro- bustness of such dating or to give a more complete picture of the past. Some studies do not present explicit results for Austria, but only for the core of the euro area. An example is Darvas -Szapary (2005) who analysed the business cycle synchronisation in the enlarged EU and therefore set up a group of countries represent- ing the core of the EU. They compared the business cycle varia- tions of these core countries (Austria, Belgium. France Germany. Italy and the Netherlands) with those of several different groups of central and eastern European countries. The only aspect of their studies that is of interest in this context is that among the core countries there exists a very high degree of business cycle syn- chronisation. This is reflected by high correlations, low volatility, small leads/lags. similar and high persistence and similar impulse- response function 113• The following studies present more details. which makes it worth to compare each of them separately to the findings of our study. They are ordered according to the consid- eration they give to business cycle variations in Austria and their detail of analysis qualifying them for a comparison. In section 9 .15 113 See Darvas -Szap6ry (2005), p. 27.