Page - 155 - in The Austrian Business Cycle in the European Context

155 presents an overview over different dating calendars for the Aus- trian and the euro area business cycle. 9. 15. 1 Turning point dates of the Austrian business cycle For the first tier of the period starting from 1964, only the studies by Breuss (1984) and Hahn - Walterskirchen (1992) provide informa- tion about possible turning point dates of the Austrian business cy- cle 126. Both studies show the same number of cycles between 1964 and 1983 with quite similar dates. The largest difference between dates identified is 2 quarters at most for troughs as well as for peaks. Concerning the present study, both methods using BK-filtered data seem to match best the findings by Breuss (1984) and Hahn -Wal- terskirchen ( 1992) for the overlapping period. This picture changes somewhat after 1985, for which period Hahn - Walterskirchen ( 1992) report quite different turning points till the end of their sam- ple period 1991 . A possible reason could be that these kinds of studies all have the problem of drawing reliable conclusions for the end of the sample period, because revisions affect especially last observations. Indeed, in the meantime several major revisions have taken place, so that GDP is nowadays defined in a different way than 15 years ago127_ The dating of the Austrian business cycle by Artis - Krolzig - Toro (2004) is decisively different from other studies and results are sometimes even in contradiction to the others. According to the majority of studies, the business cycle marked a peak around the 126 The study by Breuss gives dates starting from 1951 onwards for certain definitions of the business cycle. For technical reasons (constraints to printing), the first period is not shown here. 127 Apart from the innovations discussed in chapter 2, one further example is soft- ware production which was not covered by the definition of production several years ago.