Multiple-equilibria macroeconomic models suggest that consumers' and investors' perceptions about the state of the economy may be an important independent factor for business cycles. In this paper, we verify empirically the interrelations between waves of optimism and pessimism and subsequent...

This paper explores the disconnect of Federal Reserve data from index number theory. A consequence could have been the decreased systemic-risk misperceptions that contributed to excess risk taking prior to the housing bust. We find that most recessions in the past 50 years were preceded by more...

This paper investigates potential changes in monetary policy over the last decades using a nonparametric vector autoregression model. In the proposed model, the conditional mean and variance are time-dependent and estimated using a nonparametric local linear method, which allows for different...

This paper discusses formal quantitative algorithms that can be used to identify business cycle turning points. An intuitive, graphical derivation of these algorithms is presented along with a description of how they can be implemented making very minimal distributional assumptions. We also...

This paper proposes an econometric model of the joint dynamic relationship between the yield curve and the economy to predict business cycles. We examine the predictive value of the yield curve to forecast both future economic growth as well as the beginning and end of economic recessions at the...

This paper compares the different dynamics of the simple sum monetary aggregates and the Divisia monetary aggregate indexes over time, over the business cycle, and across high and low inflation and interest rate phases. Although traditional comparisons of the series sometimes suggest that simple...

The current financial crisis followed the “great moderation,” according to which some commentators and economists believed that the world’s central banks had gotten so good at countercyclical policy that the business cycle volatility had declined to low levels. As more and more economists...