This survey outlines the evolution of thought leading to the rrecent delopments in the study of business cycles.The subject is almost coextensive with short-term macrodynamics and has a large interface withmeconomics of growth, money, inflation, and expectations.The coverage is therefore both...

Business cycles are fairly well defined yet they have no generally accepted explanation. Natural disasters and then financial crises constituted the earliest perceived reasons for economic instability. Classical literature developed in late 19th-early 20th century favored the idea of...

This paper considers the question in its title from several angles. Part 1 looks at economic history and the development of thinking about business cycles - the popular meaning and economists' definitions and ideas. Part 2 reviews the lessons from business cycle chronologies and duration data,...

We examine the interactions within sets of up to six variables representing output, alternative measures of money and fiscal operations, inflation, interest rate, and indexes of selected leading indicators. Quarterly series are used, each taken with four lags, for three periods: 1949-82....

The flow of production and use of economic information consists of the collection and processing of primary data, the reporting of the resulting measures, and the transformation of the latter into signals or messages that presumably aid knowledge or decision-making. Each stage contributes to the...

The targeted deficit reductions of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings (GRH) law are to be temporarily suspended in case of an official determination that real economic growth either (a) has been less than one percent in the two most recent reported quarters, or (b) is projected to be less than zero in...

Some analysts see the expansion of the 1990s as uniquely long and strong. Moreover, according to one popular view, the noninflationary boom can continue indefinitely. To shed some light on this debate, this paper compares the 1990s systematically with two previous long economic expansions, using...