This article considers five broad questions about the fundamental nature of business cycles and surveys relevant recent research. It is a slightly revised version of the introductory chapter to our book, Business Cycles: Durations, Dynamics, and Forecasting (Diebold and Rudebusch 1999). Both the...

Two often-divergent U.S. GDP estimates are available, a widely-used expenditure-side version GDPE, and a much less widely-used income-side version GDI . The authors propose and explore a "forecast combination" approach to combining them. They then put the theory to work, producing a superior...

Previous investigations of whether the volatility of the U.S. economy diminished after World War II have been inconclusive because of questionable prewar macroeconomic aggregates. We examine, more broadly, the hypothesis of the stabilization of the postwar economy by focusing on the duration of...

We provide an investigation of duration dependence in prewar business expansions, contractions, and whole cycles for France, Germany, and Great Britain. Our results, obtained using both nonparametric and parametric procedures, generally indicate the presence of positive duration dependence in...

We provide a new and superior measure of U.S. GDP, obtained by applying optimal signal-extraction techniques to the (noisy) expenditure-side and income-side estimates. Its properties -- particularly as regards serial correlation -- differ markedly from those of the standard expenditure-side...

We propose and implement a framework for characterizing and monitoring the global business cycle. Our framework utilizes high-frequency data, allows us to account for a potentially large amount of missing observations, and is designed to facilitate the updating of global activity estimates as...