Synchronized expansions and contractions across sectors define business cycles. Yet synchronization is puzzling because productivity across sectors exhibits weak correlation. While previous work examined production complementarity, our analysis explores complementarity in information...

How are applications to start new businesses related to aggregate economic activity? This paper explores the properties of three monthly business application series from the U.S. Census Bureau's Business Formation Statistics as economic indicators: all business applications, business...

This note explains the diverging trends between real and nominal aggregate inventory-sales ratios. The combined effect of two features of the data explains the divergence. First, while aggregate sales include both goods and services, inventories include only goods. Second, there has been a...

The Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) and other indices of consumer confidence are prominent in public discourse on the economy but have little presence in modern economic research. The sparsity of modern research follows an earlier period when economists scrutinized in some depth the...

This article evaluates a large collection of systemic risk measures based on their ability to predict macroeconomic downturns. We evaluate 19 measures of systemic risk in the US and Europe spanning several decades. We propose dimension reduction estimators for constructing systemic risk indexes...

Over the last twenty-five years, a set of influential studies has placed interest rates at the heart of analyses that interpret and evaluate monetary policies. In light of this work, the Federal Reserve's recent policy of "quantitative easing," with its goal of affecting the supply of liquid...

Social media enable promising new approaches to measuring economic activity and analyzing economic behavior at high frequency and in real time using information independent from standard survey and administrative sources. This paper uses data from Twitter to create indexes of job loss, job...