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 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...

Effectively predicting cyclical movements in the economy is a major challenge. While there are other approaches to forecasting, the U.S. leading index has long been used to analyze and predict economic fluctuations. We describe and test a new procedure for making the index more timely. The new...

In an important paper, Diebold and Rudebusch (1991) find that, despite good performance for post revision historical versions, the U.S. Index of Leading Economic Indicators (LEI) fails to improve forecasts in real time out-of-sample tests. This paper revisits the issue of real-time performance...

This paper reports real-time out-of-sample tests of the ability of the U.S. Index Leading Economic Indicators (LEI) to forecast the economy using "composition-changing" "as-published" versions of the LEI. It is an extension of recent work that focused on forecasts with a "composition-constant"...

Countries and periods that benefit from higher economic growth trends are likely to enjoy additional gains from more moderate business cycles; with less frequent and/or milder recessions. Correspondingly, where and when growth gets to be disappointingly low, business cycles are likely to get...

Clusters of cyclical turning points in the coincident indicators help us identify and date euro area recessions and recoveries in the past several decades. In the USA and some other countries, composite indexes of coincident indicators (CEI) are used to date classical business cycle turning...

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...