In the context of the dominance of the Keynesian paradigm and the use of economic policies to stabilise economic fluctuations, the world economy experienced decades of sustained growth. Nonetheless, the mid-1970s witnessed a severe crisis and a deep recession that called the attention of researchers to revisit the analysis of the nature of business cycles (BC). Ever since, numerous theories have been put forward to investigate their causes, transmission mechanisms and effects. in turn, on the emperical side, different methodologies have been introduced to analyse the main features of business cycles, but soon two of them became the most popular in the literature. The first one is called growth cycles, an approach linked to the real BC theory proposed by Lucas (1977) and to the empirical methodology by Kydland and Prescott (1990).