Seite - 156 - in The Austrian Business Cycle in the European Context

156 change of the year 1985-1986 and a trough two years later. Artis - Krolzig - Toro (2004) found turning points with opposite signs in the respective periods, however. The authors used a different defini- tion of the business cycle by focussing on the classical cycle. This obviously seems to matter a lot. For economic policy, this would require a different stance. The results by Artis -Krolzig - Toro (2004) deviate not so much from our findings, but show more cycles. One reason could be that our criteria for identifying turning points are more restrictive than their Markov-switching model approach. 9. 15.2 Turning point dates of the euro area business cycle In order to date the euro area business cycle, only our results based on just HP- and BK-filtered data can be compared with those of other studies, as our dynamic factor model approach does not consider the euro area as a whole, but Austria, Germany and the rest of the euro area separately. In chapter 3, this ap- proach was justified by avoiding a bias towards a common cycli- cality which could result from the large economic weight of Ger- many in the euro area aggregate. The studies defining the business cycle in the classical way show fewer cycles than the others, but between them the respective re- sults correspond quite well. Only for rather strong recessions and booms our HP- and BK-filtered results match with their findings. This is true for the peak at the beginning of 1980 and the troughs in 1982 and 1993. The turning point dates of the CEPR seem to lead ours by some quarters in most cases. Furthermore, the authors found an extra cycle between 1997 and 1999, which was not recognised by our Bry-Boschan routine. On the other hand, the studies by Forni et al. (2000) and Artis - Kro/zig - Toro (2004) show results quite similar to ours, but with leads and lags varying somewhat over time.