We discuss properties of alternatives or complements to GDP as a measure of welfare at business cycle frequencies. We argue that these figures are not useful to measure the welfare costs of business cycles. First, data is not available at an appropriate quality and frequency. Second, since the...

We use factor analysis to summarize information from various macroeconomic indicators, effectively producing coincident indicators for the Chinese economy. We compare the dynamics of the estimated factors with GDP, and compare our factors with other published indicators for the Chinese economy....

This paper focuses on testing non-stationary real-time data for forecastability, i.e., whether data revisions reduce noise or are news, by putting data releases in vector-error correction forms. To deal with historical revisions which affect the whole vintage of time series due to redefinitions,...