In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the moments of the yield curve (or alternatively, the term spread) as a predictor of future economic activity, defined as either recessions, or industrial production growth. In this paper, we re-examine the evidence for this predictor for the...

This article examines the performance of various financial variables as predictors of subsequent U.S. recessions. Series such as interest rates and spreads, stock prices, currencies, and monetary aggregates are evaluated singly and in comparison with other financial and non-financial indicators....

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...

The composite index of leading indicators is found to be a valuable tool for predicting not only the direction but also the size of near- term changes in aggregate economic activity. This conclusion is based on assessments of the leading index as a predictor of (1) business cycle turning points...

This paper proposes a new way of displaying and analyzing macroeconomic time series to form recession forecasts. The proposed data displays contain the last three years of each expansion. These allow observers to see for themselves what is different about the last year before recession. Based on...

We find evidence suggesting that surveys of professional forecasters are biased by strategic incentives. First, we find that individual forecasts overreact to idiosyncratic information but underreact to common information. Second, we show that this bias is not present in forecasts data that is...

This paper exploits a data rich environment to provide direct econometric estimates of time-varying macroeconomic uncertainty, defined as the common volatility in the unforecastable component of a large number of economic indicators. Our estimates display significant independent variations from...

Previous work by Dumas and Solnik (1993) has shown that a CAPM which incorporates foreign-exchange risk premia (a so-called 'international CAPM') is better capable empirically of explaining the structure of worldwide rates of return than does the classic CAPM. In the specification of that test,...

This paper examines the forecasting performance of various leading economic indicators and composite indexes since 1988. in particular during the onset of the 1990 recession. The primary focus is on an experimental recession index (tile "XRI"). a composite index which provides probabilistic...

This paper represents a very early progress report on a new study of business cycle indicators for the United States. Our host organization, CIRET, is concerned with research on surveys of economic tendencies that cover broad areas of business, investment, and consumer behavior. These inquiries...