Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- PART I: INTRODUCTION -- 1. Questions about Business Cycles -- PART II: BUSINESS CYCLE DURATIONS -- 2. Have Postwar Economic Fluctuations Been Stabilized? -- 3. Shorter Recessions and Longer Expansions -- 4. A Nonparametric Investigation of...

We examine empirically the response of bond returns and their volatility to good and bad macroeconomic news during expansions and recessions. We find that macroeconomic announcements are most important when they contain bad news for bond returns in expansions and, to a lesser extent, good news...

We answer the somewhat narrower question of whether hedge funds adjust their conditional market exposure in response to real-time changes in macroeconomic conditions, and whether doing so improves their performance. We find that hedge funds di↵er substantially in their responsiveness to...

We study the real-time signals provided by the Aruoba-Diebold-Scotti Index of Business conditions (ADS) for tracking economic activity at high frequency. We start with exit from the Great Recession, comparing the evolution of real-time vintage beliefs to a "final" late-vintage chronology. We...