The Business Cycle Dating Committee (BCDC) of the National Bureau of Economic Research provides a historical chronology of business cycle turning points. This paper investigates three central aspects about this chronology: (1) How skillful is the BCDC in classifying economic activity into...

In a common ROC study design, several readers are asked to rate diagnostics of the same cases processed under different modalities. We describe a Bayesian hierarchical model that facilitates the analysis of this study design by explicitly modeling the three sources of variation inherent to it....