Further Evidence on the Asymmetric Behavior of Economic Time Series over the Business Cycle

Evidence has recently been put forward to support the hypothesis that recessions tend to be steeper than recoveries in economic activity. That evidence, however, was confined to the behavior of the unemployment rate, this paper looks at the behavior of real GNP, investment, and productivity in the United States since 1948 and concludes that these series ' behavior do not seem to support the asymmetry hypothesis. I