This article is based on the author’s Homer Jones Memorial Lecture delivered at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, April 2, 2014.

Business recessions are notoriously hard to predict accurately, hence the quip that economists have predicted eight of the last five recessions. This article derives a six-month-ahead recession signal that reduces the number of false signals outside of recession, without impairing the ability to...

This paper evaluates the ability of a statistical regime-switching model to identify turning points in U.S. economic activity in real time. The authors work with a Markov-switching model fit to real gross domestic product and employment data that, when estimated on the entire postwar sample,...

This article is a reprint of a lecture - given in honor of Homer Jones - that examines the causes of the Long Boom. John B. Taylor defines the Long Boom from 1982 to the present - as the period of time in which the United States has known unprecedented economic stability. This period includes...

Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) projections are important because they provide information for evaluating current monetary policy intentions and because they indicate what FOMC members think will be the likely consequence of their policies. Knowing the Fed’s objectives, their forecasts,...

This article was originally presented as a speech at the Charlotte Economics Club, Charlotte, North Carolina, February 25, 2004.