Page - 153 - in The Austrian Business Cycle in the European Context

153 9 .14 Comparing the results with the study by Hahn - Walferskirchen (1992) The last study with which we want to compare our results is the one by Hahn - Walterskirchen ( 1992) for the Austrian, German and US business cycle. They used quarterly data starting from 1960 till 1992 for industrial production, GDP as well as its demand side ag- gregates for all three countries. De-trending was done with a basic structural model using a stochastic random-walk trend with vari- able drift and clearing for seasonal variations at the same time. The residual cyclical component was dated by determination of local minima and maxima. As no mechanical dating rule was used, this was done by visual inspection. Again, we compare the turning points published by Hahn - Wal- terskirchen ( 1992) only for the period overlapping with ours. For Austria, the authors dated the first peak in the second quarter of 1977, which corresponds exactly with our findings for BK-filtered time series. All other approaches failed to show this turning point. The subsequent trough in the third quarter of 1978 is again mirrored only by our BK-filtering method. While the just BK-filtered GV Aex se- ries dates it in the same quarter, the dynamic factor model ap- proach found it one quarter earlier in 2Q 1978. The next cycle starts with a peak at the beginning of 1980. Our first- order-differenced series fail again to show this turning point, whereas both approaches using HP-filtered data matched ex- actly. For the BK-filtered series, this peak is dated one quarter ear- lier at the end of 1979. The authors dated the following trough in the last quarter of 1982. This is fully confirmed by our dynamic fac- tor model approach based on HP- and BK-filtered data (first-order differences fail to show this). With our just filtered data only the BK filter shows a matching turning point, but dates this trough one quarter earlier in 3Q 1982. According to Hahn - Walterskirchen (1992), the next cycle's peak was reached in 2Q 1985, which again is reflected best by our BK-