This article examines the performance of various financial variables as predictors of subsequent U.S. recessions. Series such as interest rates and spreads, stock prices, currencies, and monetary aggregates are evaluated singly and in comparison with other financial and non-financial indicators....

This paper proposes a new way of displaying and analyzing macroeconomic time series to form recession forecasts. The proposed data displays contain the last three years of each expansion. These allow observers to see for themselves what is different about the last year before recession. Based on...

Unemployment is notoriously difficult to predict. In previous studies, once country fixed effects are added to panel estimates, few variables predict changes in unemployment rates. Using panel data for 29 European countries over 439 months between 1985 and 2021 in an unbalanced country*month...

Was the Depression forecastable? After the Crash, how long did it take contemporary economic forecasters to realize how severe the downturn was going to be? How long should it Have taken them to come to this realization? These questions are addressed by studying the predictions of the Harvard...

The targeted deficit reductions of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings (GRH) law are to be temporarily suspended in case of an official determination that real economic growth either (a) has been less than one percent in the two most recent reported quarters, or (b) is projected to be less than zero in...

The usual practice in economic forecasting is to report point predictions without specifying the attached probabilities. Periodic surveys of such forecasts produce group averages, which are taken to indicate the "consensus" of experts. Measures of the dispersion of individual forecasts around...

This paper reports on a comprehensive study of the distributions of summary measures of error for a large collection of quarterly multiperiod predictions of six variables representing inflation, real qrowth, unemployment,and percentage changes in nominal GNP and two of its more volatile...

For many years a system of leading, coincident, and lagging economic indicators, first developed in the 1930s by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), has been widely used in the United States to appraise the state of the business cycle. Since 1961 the current monthly figures for...

Each quarter since 1968 the National Bureau of Economic Research, in collaboration with the American Statistical Association, has been collecting a large amount of information on the record of forecasting in the U. S. economy. This paper is a progress report on a comprehensive study of the...

The composite index of leading indicators is found to be a valuable tool for predicting not only the direction but also the size of near- term changes in aggregate economic activity. This conclusion is based on assessments of the leading index as a predictor of (1) business cycle turning points...