Clusters of cyclical turning points in the coincident indicators help us identify and date euro area recessions and recoveries in the past several decades. In the USA and some other countries, composite indexes of coincident indicators (CEI) are used to date classical business cycle turning...

In the next 10 years, there is likely to be a tight labor market, largely due to the ongoing retirement of baby boomers. This paper focuses on the details of occupations, industries, and regions in which there will be the highest risk of labor shortages in the United States. Twelve determinants...

One of the main trends in the labor market in recent years is the aging of the workforce, which partly results from older workers delaying retirement. Using the Current Population Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we find that the trend of delaying retirement began as early as the...

This article evaluates which economic indicators are the most useful for signaling recessions. The article uses a modified Markov switching method to compare the timing of recession signals across many indicators. In its present form, it is difficult to use the Markov switching methods for...

Forecasting the likelihood of recessions and slow-downs is an important issue for many who use economics in business. While there has been a large and growing body of literature on the likelihood or recessions, there has been little on slow-downs.. This paper presents a new method that uses...

We show that U.S. stock and Treasury futures prices respond sharply to recurring stale information releases. In particular, we identify a unique macroeconomic series--the U.S. Leading Economic Index^® (LEI)--which is released monthly and constructed as a summary statistic of previously released...

A study of business cycles defined as sequences of expansions and contractions in the level of general economic activity does not require trend estimation and elimination, but a study of growth cycles defined as sequences of high and low growth phases does. Major cyclical slowdowns and booms...