The dichotomous characterization of the business cycle in recessions and expansions has been central in the literature over the last fifty years. However, there are various reasons to question the adequacy of this dichotomous approach for our understanding of business cycle dynamics, as well as...

This article surveys both earlier and recent research on recession forecasting with probit based time series models. Most studies use either a static probit model or its extensions in order toestimate the recession probabilities, while others use models based on a latent variable ap-proach to...

We propose a parsimonious semiparametric method for macroeconomic forecasting during episodes of sudden changes. Based on the notion of clustering and similarity, we partition the time series into blocks, search for the closest blocks to the most recent block of observations, and with the...

Recent macroeconomic evolutions during the years 2008 and 2009 have pointed out the impact of financial markets on economic activity. In this paper, we propose to evaluate the ability of a set of financial variables to forecast recessions in the euro area by using a non-linear binary response...

In this paper, we replicate the main results of Rudebusch and Williams (2009), who show that the use of the yield spread in a probit model can predict recessions better than the Survey of Professional Forecasters. We investigate the robustness of their results in several ways: extending the...