Using Smooth Transition Regression (STR) to predict Business Cycles

Forecasting business cycles is very important in macroeconomic and it is an important part in process of economic decision-making and policy. In recent years, non-linear models have been considered more for forecasting economic variables and application of these models has been made a significant improvement in modeling of the behavior of variables in the area of macroeconomic and particularly financial economics. This article provides a convenient and powerful model for forecasting business cycles by using smooth transition regression (STR). The results show that very little error that indicates model performance is acceptable.