Seasonal and business cycles of U.S. employment

Panel A plots Hodrick-Prescott-filtered (HP-filtered) nonseasonally adjusted log national employment data (blue line) and HP-filtered seasonally adjusted log national employment data (black line). The shaded areas in panel A indicate official periods of recession as identified by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Panel B plots the point estimates of the monthly dummy coefficients ( k ) from equation 1 (asterisks) for employment, together with plus and minus two-standard-error bands (vertical lines that run through the asterisks). See the text for further details.