In the past 20 years, measures of economic uncertainty have been developed that are purely market price based; structural model based, using data on real fundamentals and asset prices; text based; or survey based. We compare the performance of these uncertainty measures in forecasting three real...

Lags in official data releases have forced economists and policymakers to leverage "alternative" or "non-traditional" data to measure business exit resulting from the COVID- 19 pandemic. We first review official data on business exit in recent decades to place the alternative measures of exit...

We discuss properties of alternatives or complements to GDP as a measure of welfare at business cycle frequencies. We argue that these figures are not useful to measure the welfare costs of business cycles. First, data is not available at an appropriate quality and frequency. Second, since the...