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...

A study of business cycles defined as sequences of expansions and contractions in the level of general economic activity does not require trend estimation and elimination, but a study of growth cycles defined as sequences of high and low growth phases does. Major cyclical slowdowns and booms...

This paper looks at the patterns of causation between income, export, import, and investment growth for 25 developing countries. Our approach differs from previous efforts in a number of ways. First, we examine each country individually in order to allow for complete heterogeneity and properly...

Purchasing power parities (PPPs) for R&D expenditure in 19 manufacturing industries are developed for France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom relative to the United States for the years 1997 and 1987. These PPPs are based on R&D input prices for specific cost categories...

This paper is a sequel to Working Paper No. 3131, "Hypotheses of Sticky Wages and Prices". My first objective is to re-examine the historical record of prices and wages. What changes in their behavior are indicated by the data and how can they be explained? Next, the models that imply that price...

In the post-World War II period, wage and price levels reacted much less to business contractions than they did in earlier times. Inflation prevailed and its persistence increased. The contractions themselves became relatively short and mild. All these developments have some common roots in the...

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 presents extensive results from testing for bias and serially correlated errors in a large collection of quarterly multiperiod predictions from surveys conducted since 1968 by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the American Statistical Association. The tests of the joint...

This paper examines the flow of production and use of economic information and analyzes the effects of measurement errors, particularly as transmitted through expectations and forecasts. Economic data are subject to a variety of errors, and the uncertainty about economic measures tends to...

This survey outlines the evolution of thought leading to the rrecent delopments in the study of business cycles.The subject is almost coextensive with short-term macrodynamics and has a large interface withmeconomics of growth, money, inflation, and expectations.The coverage is therefore both...