This paper explores the disconnect of Federal Reserve data from index number theory. A consequence could have been the decreased-systemic-risk misperceptions that contributed to excess risk-taking prior to the housing bust. We find that most recessions in the past 50 years were preceded by more...

Many structural break and regime-switching models have been used with macroeconomic and financial data. In this paper, we develop an extremely flexible modeling approach which can accommodate virtually any of these specifications. We build on earlier work showing the relationship between...