IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ucn/wpaper/201210.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Change Points and Temporal Dependence in Reconstructions of Annual Temperature: Did Europe Experience a Little Ice Age?

Author

Listed:
  • Morgan Kelly

    (University College Dublin)

  • Cormac Ó Gráda

    (University College Dublin)

Abstract

We analyze the timing and extent of northern European temperature falls during the Little Ice Age, using standard temperature reconstructions. However, we can find little evidence of long swings or structural breaks in European weather before the twentieth century. Instead, European weather between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries resembles uncorrelated draws from a distribution with a constant mean (although there are decades of markedly lower summer temperature); with the same behaviour holding more tentatively back to the twelfth century. Our results suggest that the existing consensus about a Little Ice Age in Europe may stem from a Slutsky effect, where the standard climatological practice of smoothing data before analysis gives the spurious appearance of irregular oscillations.

Suggested Citation

  • Morgan Kelly & Cormac Ó Gráda, 2012. "Change Points and Temporal Dependence in Reconstructions of Annual Temperature: Did Europe Experience a Little Ice Age?," Working Papers 201210, School of Economics, University College Dublin.
    • Handle: RePEc:ucn:wpaper:201210
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.ucd.ie/t4cms/WP12_10.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2012
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jushan Bai & Pierre Perron, 1998. "Estimating and Testing Linear Models with Multiple Structural Changes," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 66(1), pages 47-78, January.
    2. Ardia, David, 2009. "Bayesian Estimation of the GARCH(1,1) Model with Student-t Innovations in R," MPRA Paper 17414, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Börner, Lars & Severgnini, Battista, 2011. "Epidemic trade," Discussion Papers 2011/12, Free University Berlin, School of Business & Economics.
    2. José L. Martínez González, 2019. "High Wages or Wages For Energy? An Alternative View of The British Case (1645-1700)," Working Papers 0158, European Historical Economics Society (EHES).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Akosah, Nana Kwame & Alagidede, Imhotep Paul & Schaling, Eric, 2020. "Testing for asymmetry in monetary policy rule for small-open developing economies: Multiscale Bayesian quantile evidence from Ghana," The Journal of Economic Asymmetries, Elsevier, vol. 22(C).
    2. Kelly Burns & Imad Moosa, 2017. "Demystifying the Meese–Rogoff puzzle: structural breaks or measures of forecasting accuracy?," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 49(48), pages 4897-4910, October.
    3. Matteo Mogliani, 2010. "Residual-based tests for cointegration and multiple deterministic structural breaks: A Monte Carlo study," Working Papers halshs-00564897, HAL.
    4. J. Cuñado & L. Gil-Alana & F. Gracia, 2009. "US stock market volatility persistence: evidence before and after the burst of the IT bubble," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 33(3), pages 233-252, October.
    5. Vincent Dekker & Karsten Schweikert, 2021. "A Comparison of Different Data-driven Procedures to Determine the Bunching Window," Public Finance Review, , vol. 49(2), pages 262-293, March.
    6. Kar, Sabyasachi & Pritchett, Lant & Raihan, Selim & Sen, Kunal, 2013. "Looking for a break: Identifying transitions in growth regimes," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 38(PB), pages 151-166.
    7. Mariam Camarero & Juan Sapena & Cecilio Tamarit, 2020. "Modelling Time-Varying Parameters in Panel Data State-Space Frameworks: An Application to the Feldstein–Horioka Puzzle," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 56(1), pages 87-114, June.
    8. Bernard, Jean-Thomas & Idoudi, Nadhem & Khalaf, Lynda & Yelou, Clement, 2007. "Finite sample multivariate structural change tests with application to energy demand models," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 141(2), pages 1219-1244, December.
    9. Anne Morrison Piehl & Suzanne J. Cooper & Anthony A. Braga & David M. Kennedy, 2003. "Testing for Structural Breaks in the Evaluation of Programs," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 85(3), pages 550-558, August.
    10. Antonia López Villavicencio & Josep Lluís Raymond Bara, 2006. "The short and long-run determinants of the real exchange rate in Mexico," Working Papers wpdea0606, Department of Applied Economics at Universitat Autonoma of Barcelona.
    11. Garrod Brian & Almeida António & Machado Luiz, 2023. "Modelling of nonlinear asymmetric effects of changes in tourism on economic growth in an autonomous small-island economy," European Journal of Tourism, Hospitality and Recreation, Sciendo, vol. 13(2), pages 154-172, December.
    12. Gupta, Kuhika & Nowlin, Matthew C. & Ripberger, Joseph T. & Jenkins-Smith, Hank C. & Silva, Carol L., 2019. "Tracking the nuclear ‘mood’ in the United States: Introducing a long term measure of public opinion about nuclear energy using aggregate survey data," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 133(C).
    13. Kevin S. Nell & Maria M. De Mello, 2019. "The interdependence between the saving rate and technology across regimes: evidence from South Africa," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 56(1), pages 269-300, January.
    14. Geoffrey Ngene & Kenneth A. Tah & Ali F. Darrat, 2017. "Long memory or structural breaks: Some evidence for African stock markets," Review of Financial Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 34(1), pages 61-73, September.
    15. Raggi, Davide & Bordignon, Silvano, 2012. "Long memory and nonlinearities in realized volatility: A Markov switching approach," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 56(11), pages 3730-3742.
    16. Parma Chakravartti & Sudipto Mundle, 2017. "An Automatic Leading Indicator Based Growth Forecast For 2016-17 and The Outlook Beyond," Working Papers id:11773, eSocialSciences.
    17. Shernaz Bodhanwala & Harsh Purohit & Nidhi Choudhary, 2020. "The Causal Dynamics in Indian Agriculture Commodity Prices and Macro-Economic Variables in the Presence of a Structural Break," Global Business Review, International Management Institute, vol. 21(1), pages 241-261, February.
    18. Meng Xu & Avishai Ceder & Ziyou Gao & Wei Guan, 2010. "Mass transit systems of Beijing: governance evolution and analysis," Transportation, Springer, vol. 37(5), pages 709-729, September.
    19. Brown, William Jr. & Burdekin, Richard C.K. & Weidenmier, Marc D., 2006. "Volatility in an era of reduced uncertainty: Lessons from Pax Britannica," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 79(3), pages 693-707, March.
    20. Stephen G Cecchetti & Alfonso Flores-Lagunes & Stefan Krause, 2005. "Assessing the Sources of Changes in the Volatility of Real Growth," RBA Annual Conference Volume (Discontinued), in: Christopher Kent & David Norman (ed.),The Changing Nature of the Business Cycle, Reserve Bank of Australia.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Little Ice Age; Slutsky effect;

    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:ucn:wpaper:201210. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Nicolas Clifton (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/educdie.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.