Page - 128 - in The Austrian Business Cycle in the European Context

128 In this case, the coincident behaviour of manufacturing produc- tion with the common component reflected in autGV Aex is even more robust across all different filtering methods than it was in the case of using an ad-hoc definition of the business cycle. 9 .2 Comparing the results with the study by Monch - Uhlig (2004) The results of the present study are only to a limited degree com- parable with the study of Monch - Uhlig (2004). They constructed a monthly series of euro area GDP by interpolating quarterly data using a method proposed by Bernanke - Gert/er - Watson ( 1997). The interpolation has been done by regressing quarterly figures on monthly series of industrial production, retail sales, employment, etc. The authors tried to track the official NBER dating of the US cycle and the one set up by the CEPR for the euro area by apply- ing the Bry-Boschan algorithm refined by an amplitude/phase- length criterion. As this study concentrates entirely on the classical definition of the cycle as described in chapter 3, the number of turning points found in Mench - Uhlig (2004) is clearly lower than in the present study. Nevertheless, a comparison between their dates and ours can be informative. They only identified three complete cycles. The first starts with a peak in August of 197 4 and reaches a trough in April 1975. The next peak is dated at March 1980 and is followed by a trough two-and-one-half years later in July 1982. In February 1992, the peak of the last cycle was reached and the last turning point was identified for January 1993. As time series used in this study start in 197 6, only two cycle dates of the study of Monch - Uhlig (2004) can be compared with ours. The peak of the euro area business cycle in March 1980 found by the authors is reflected in our HP- and BK-filter case for the univari- ate ad-hoc approach. In both cases, a peak is dated in the first quarter of 1980. Interestingly, the dating of first-order-differenced