In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the moments of the yield curve (or alternatively, the term spread) as a predictor of future economic activity, defined as either recessions, or industrial production growth. In this paper, we re-examine the evidence for this predictor for the...

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...

We find evidence suggesting that surveys of professional forecasters are biased by strategic incentives. First, we find that individual forecasts overreact to idiosyncratic information but underreact to common information. Second, we show that this bias is not present in forecasts data that is...

Previous work by Dumas and Solnik (1993) has shown that a CAPM which incorporates foreign-exchange risk premia (a so-called 'international CAPM') is better capable empirically of explaining the structure of worldwide rates of return than does the classic CAPM. In the specification of that test,...

This paper exploits a data rich environment to provide direct econometric estimates of time-varying macroeconomic uncertainty, defined as the common volatility in the unforecastable component of a large number of economic indicators. Our estimates display significant independent variations from...

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...

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...

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....