Macroeconomics, Nonlinearities, and the Business Cycle

This dissertation focuses on describing and explaining business cycle dynamics. Motivated by the extraordinary strong economic downturn in 2008/2009, it emphasis the importance of modeling nonlinearities. This thesis should be regarded as a contribution to applied econometrics and can be clustered into two categories. The articles in chapter one and two take an applied stance by exploring different modeling strategies for the German economy. The articles in chapter three and four cover methodological contributions, especially with regard to economic forecasting.