In this paper, we test whether a regime shift from expansion to recession and vice versa is, ceteris paribus, equally likely throughout the year. If not, then it may, for instance, be less likely to get out of a recession in the middle of the winter than it is, say, in the spring or summer. We...

Six months of the year, which for convenience we call the spring and Christmas seasons, have a statistically higher number of troughs than the other six months of the year. In contrast, peaks do not exhibit any clustering. These results are drawn from the NBER chronology as well as alternative...