Business cycle dynamics: A bottom-up approach with Markov-chain measurement

Business cycle dynamics can be seen as footprints left by individual decision makers. Tracing those footprints we offer a novel, largely model independent and exogenous measure of the business cycle dynamics. This measure also, allows for distinguishing positive and negative shocks without prior estimation. Utilizing more than twenty-thousand observations of firms surveyed quarterly in the periods (1999-2006), we employ a Markov-chain approach combined with conventional time series econometrics for gauging the dynamics of business cycles. Since we start the analysis with firm level data we label our method the "bottom-up approach".