The book provides a thorough and sophisticated descriptive analysis of business cycles in a historical perspective. The study is based on the latest available time series as well as latest techniques from the frequency domain. A combined univariate and bivariate analysis is conducted on the national as well as supranational (G7- and Euro-Area wide) level. Issues of stability, volatility, and cyclicality are investigated jointly. An extensive analysis of US manufacturing investment series on the fairly disaggregated four-digit level highlights the limits of linear models to capture the...