Duration Of Business Cycles

In this paper the Bry and Boschan (1971) procedure is modified such that it can be applied to quarterly data in order to recalculate the max-imum duration of business cycles. In this way it can be shown that the maximum duration of business cycles constitutes 42 quarters in the United States of America and 49 quarters in the United Kingdom. The large difference to the maximum duration of Burns and Mitchell (1946) makes clear that caution is advisable with the application of the filters by Baxter and King (1999) and Christiano and Fitzgerald (2003).