For many years a system of leading, coincident, and lagging economic indicators, first developed in the 1930s by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), has been widely used in the United States to appraise the state of the business cycle. Since 1961 the current monthly figures for...

A working definition, first formulated in the 1920's by Mitchell and revised in the 1940's, has been in use at the National Bureau for over fifty years and is still employed to identify and date business cycles. The NBER historical chronologies for England, France, and Germany as well as the...

Various structural, institutional, and policy changes have contributed to the evolution of business cycles, since World War II business expansions have been much longer and contractions much shorter than before. Over nearly 200 years of U.S. history expansions have been long relative to...

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...