This paper presents evidence that the economic stall speed concept has some empirical content, and can be moderately useful in forecasting recessions. Specifically, output tends to transition to a slow-growth phase at the end of expansions before falling into a recession, and the paper designs...

This paper discusses various concepts of unemployment rate benchmarks that are frequently used by policymakers for assessing the current state of the economy as it relates to the pursuit of both price stability and maximum employment. In particular, we propose two broad categories of...

COVID-19 has depressed economic activity around the world. The initial contraction may be amplified by the limited space for conventional monetary policy actions to support recovery implied by the low level of nominal interest rates recently. Model simulations assuming an initial contraction in...

Over the Great Moderation period in the United States, we find that corporate credit spreads embed crucial information about the one-year-ahead probability of recession, as evidenced by both in-and out-of-sample fit. Furthermore, the incidence of false positive predictions of recession is...

Examining a parsimonious, yet comprehensive, set of recession signals yields three lessons. First, signals from financial markets, leading indicators of activity, and gauges of the macroeconomic environment are each useful at different horizons, with leading indicators and financial signals...

We use machine learning methods to examine the power of Treasury term spreads and other financial market and macroeconomic variables to forecast US recessions, vis-à-vis probit regression. In particular we propose a novel strategy for conducting cross-validation on classifiers trained with...

What is the output gap? There are many definitions in the economics literature, all of which have a long history. I discuss three alternatives: the deviation of output from its long-run stochastic trend (i.e., the "Beveridge-Nelson cycle"); the deviation of output from the level consistent with...

This paper provides new evidence for cyclicality in the job-search effort of employed workers, on-the-job search (OJS) intensity, in the United States using American Time Use Survey and various cyclical indicators. We find that OJS intensity is countercyclical along both the extensive and...

Despite the recent patch of sluggish growth, the U.S. economy has experienced a period of remarkable stability since the mid-1980s. One popular explanation attributes the diminished variability of economic activity to information-technology-led improvements in inventory management. Our results,...

Using U.S. data from 1929 to 2015, we show that elevated credit-market sentiment in year t-2 is associated with a decline in economic activity in years t and t+1. Underlying this result is the existence of predictable mean reversion in credit-market conditions. When credit risk is aggressively...