Clusters of cyclical turning points in the coincident indicators help us identify and date Euro Area recessions and recoveries in the past several decades. In the U.S. and some other countries, composite indexes of coincident indicators (CEI) are used to date classical business cycle turning...

This paper reports real-time out-of-sample tests of the ability of the U.S. Index Leading Economic Indicators (LEI) to forecast the economy using "composition-changing" "as-published" versions of the LEI. It is an extension of recent work that focused on forecasts with a "composition-constant"...

In an important paper, Diebold and Rudebusch (1991) find that, despite good performance for post revision historical versions, the U.S. Index of Leading Economic Indicators (LEI) fails to improve forecasts in real time out-of-sample tests. This paper revisits the issue of real-time performance...