Medium Business Cycles in the Southeastern United States

The “business cycle” traditionally has been defined as the cycle in real economic series falling into a frequency band of 8 to 32 quarters.   However, Comin and Gertler in their paper “Medium-Term Business Cycles” (2006, American Economic Review) show that NBER reference dates for the U.S. business cycle are well matched by cycles in U.S. per capita non-farm business output with frequency of 2-200 quarters.  They refer to this cycle falling into a 2-200 quarter frequency band as a “medium-term’ cycle.  This paper applies the band-pass filter of Christiano and Fitzgerald (2004, Review of Economics and Statistics) to identify medium cycles in quarterly real personal income in the United States, the Southeastern region, and the individual states within the Southeast.  Results suggest that the business cycle within the Southeastern region conforms closely to that of the aggregate US economy.  Results also suggest that the cyclical experience of the Southeast is similar to other regions of the country.  Finally, most states within the Southeast have experienced similar business cycles; however, there are notable exceptions.