  This paper is concerned with the spectral properties of matrices associated
with linear filters for the estimation of the underlying trend of a time
series. The interest lies in the fact that the eigenvectors can be interpreted
as the latent components of any time series that the filter smooths through the
corresponding eigenvalues. A difficulty arises because matrices associated with
trend filters are finite approximations of Toeplitz operators and therefore
very little is known about their eigenstructure, which also depends on the
boundary conditions or, equivalently, on the filters for trend estimation at
the end of the sample. Assuming reflecting boundary conditions, we derive a
time series decomposition in terms of periodic latent components and
corresponding smoothing eigenvalues. This decomposition depends on the local
polynomial regression estimator chosen for the interior. Otherwise, the
eigenvalue distribution is derived with an approximation measured by the size
of the perturbation that different boundary conditions apport to the
eigenvalues of matrices belonging to algebras with known spectral properties,
such as the Circulant or the Cosine. The analytical form of the eigenvectors is
then derived with an approximation that involves the extremes only. A further
topic investigated in the paper concerns a strategy for a filter design in the
time domain. Based on cut-off eigenvalues, new estimators are derived, that are
less variable and almost equally biased as the original estimator, based on all
the eigenvalues. Empirical examples illustrate the effectiveness of the method.
