, ; ; ; "ActiveFedora::Aggregation::ListSource" . a , ; "Measurement with Minimal Theory"; ; "jannelle.ruswick@mpls.frb.org"; "McGrattan, Ellen R."; "Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis"; "Applied macroeconomists interested in identifying the sources of business cycle fluctuations typically have no more than 40 or 50 years of data at a quarterly frequency. With sample sizes that small, identification may not be possible even with correctly specified representations of the data. In this article, I investigate whether small samples are indeed a problem for some commonly used statistical representations. I compare three—a vector autoregressive moving average (VARMA), an unrestricted state space, and a restricted state space—that are all consistent with the same prototype business cycle model. The statistical representations that I consider differ in the amount of a priori theory that is imposed, but all are correctly specified. I find that the identifying assumptions of VARMAs and unrestricted state space representations are too minimal: the range of estimates for statistics of interest for business cycle researchers is so large as to be uninformative."^^; "2010-07"; "2019-12-13T20:53:53.137510483+00:00"^^; "https://doi.org/10.21034/qr.3311"; ; "2020-06-08T21:20:23.468034853+00:00"^^; "Article"; "508"; "Quarterly review (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Research Department)"; "Vol. 33, No. 1"; ; ; ; ; "Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Research Department"; """Download the [data file](https://researchdatabase.minneapolisfed.org/downloads/cr56n098w) and [M-files and Ftools](https://researchdatabase.minneapolisfed.org/downloads/4x51hj04n). Related paper: [Working Paper 643](https://doi.org/10.21034/wp.643)"""^^; ; "Publication" . ; ; . ; ; .