IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedmsr/244.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Is there a trend break in U.S. GNP? A macroeconomic perspective

Author

Listed:
  • Lutz Kilian
  • Lee E. Ohanian

Abstract

Unit root tests against trend break alternatives are based on the premise that the dating of the trend breaks coincides with major economic events with permanent effects on economic activity, such as wars and depressions. Standard economic theory, however, suggests that these events have large transitory, rather than permanent, effects on economic activity. Conventional unit root tests against trend break alternatives based on linear ARIMA models do not capture these transitory effects and can result in severely distorted inference. We quantify the size distortions for a simple model in which the effects of wars and depressions can reasonably be interpreted as transitory. Monte Carlo simulations show that in moderate samples, the widely used Zivot-Andrews (1992) test mistakes transitory dynamics for trend breaks with high probability. We conclude that these tests should be used only if there are no plausible economic explanations for apparent trend breaks in the data

Suggested Citation

  • Lutz Kilian & Lee E. Ohanian, 1998. "Is there a trend break in U.S. GNP? A macroeconomic perspective," Staff Report 244, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedmsr:244
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr244.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: http://minneapolisfed.org/research/common/pub_detail.cfm?pb_autonum_id=741
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Murray, Christian J. & Nelson, Charles R., 2000. "The uncertain trend in U.S. GDP," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 46(1), pages 79-95, August.
    2. Rahman, Abdul & Saadi, Samir, 2008. "Random walk and breaking trend in financial series: An econometric critique of unit root tests," Review of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 17(3), pages 204-212, August.
    3. Abdul Rahman & Samir Saadi, 2007. "Is South Korea's stock market efficient? A note," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(1), pages 71-74.
    4. Darne, Olivier & Diebolt, Claude, 2004. "Unit roots and infrequent large shocks: new international evidence on output," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 51(7), pages 1449-1465, October.
    5. David E. Rapach, 2002. "Are Real GDP Levels Nonstationary? Evidence from Panel Data Tests," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 68(3), pages 473-495, January.
    6. Bebonchu Atems & Jason Jones, 2015. "Income inequality and economic growth: a panel VAR approach," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 48(4), pages 1541-1561, June.
    7. Paraskevi Salamaliki & Ioannis Venetis & Nicholas Giannakopoulos, 2013. "The causal relationship between female labor supply and fertility in the USA: updated evidence via a time series multi-horizon approach," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 26(1), pages 109-145, January.
    8. Newbold, Paul & Leybourne, Stephen & Wohar, Mark E., 2001. "Trend-stationarity, difference-stationarity, or neither: further diagnostic tests with an application to U.S. Real GNP, 1875-1993," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 53(1), pages 85-102.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Gross national product;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedmsr:244. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kate Hansel (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cfrbmus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.