Countries and periods that benefit from higher economic growth trends are likely to enjoy additional gains from more moderate business cycles; with less frequent and/or milder recessions. Correspondingly, where and when growth gets to be disappointingly low, business cycles are likely to get...

This paper reviews some of China’s high frequency economic indicators and our principal findings on their selection and use. Our aim is to develop a composite index of coincident indicators (CEI) which can be used to obtain timely information on the present state of the China’s economy and...

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...

A major shortcoming of the U.S. leading index is that it does not use the most recent information for stock prices and yield spreads. The index methodology ignores these data in favor of a time-consistent set of components (i.e., all of the components must refer to the previous month). An...

Effectively predicting cyclical movements in the economy is a major challenge. While there are other approaches to forecasting, the U.S. leading index has long been used to analyze and predict economic fluctuations. We describe and test a new procedure for making the index more timely. The new...

This study appraises The Conference Board (TCB) coincident and leading economic indices (CEI and LEI) for China with a focus on China CEI. The evaluation is mainly based on a critical discussion of the major data problems in the Chinese official statistics and their implications in modeling...

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"...

Leading indicators represent variables that tend to precede and predict coincident indicators of general economic activity, which as a multivariate concept, can be measured with the help of metrics on employment, production, total income and sales in real (inflation adjusted) terms. In many...

Some analysts see the expansion of the 1990s as uniquely long and strong. Moreover, according to one popular view, the noninflationary boom can continue indefinitely. To shed some light on this debate, this paper compares the 1990s systematically with two previous long economic expansions, using...