Page - 100 - in The Austrian Business Cycle in the European Context

100 can be regarded as sector- or country-specific idiosyncratic cycli- cality. The series representing the common component can be processed further in most cases like just filtered ones. Table A 7 a to c show for different filtering techniques cross-correlations with the reference series, both represented only by their common compo- nent variability. Again, the Austrian gross value added (without agriculture and forestry) serves as the reference series, but this time it is cleaned for all its idiosyncratic variation. In the first-order-difference case, it can be observed that the Aus- trian construction industry - while exhibiting only a small part of common variation according to Table A 6 - shows a strong co- movement with the reference series. Furthermore, nearly all series seem to be coincident with the reference cycle, which corre- sponds to the picture we got from the analysis carried out with just filtered series as given in Table A 1 a. Only two series are not found to be coincident. The first is ger JK (the German sector of financial intermediation, real estate and business services) which shows a lag of 4 quarters in the case of observing only the common com- ponent. This lag was somewhat shorter for the just filtered series (2 quarters). The second is the German trade, restaurants and trans- port and communication sector. Its common-component varia- tion shows a leading behaviour of 2 quarters compared with the reference cycle, whereas it has been classified as lagging by 4 quarters in the unprocessed case. All in all, for first-order- differenced series, the common-components variations convey nearly the same picture of leads and lags. For HP-filtered data, Table A 7 b reveals that all series cleaned for their idiosyncratic movements show coincident behaviour with re- gard to the business cycle represented by the cleaned reference series. For the uncleaned series, as shown in Table A 1 b, again the same picture emerges, but differences can be observed for gerGHI and ger JK, with both series classified as lagging according to their highest cross-correlations.