Various structural, institutional, and policy changes have contributed to the evolution of business cycles, since World War II business expansions have been much longer and contractions much shorter than before. Over nearly 200 years of U.S. history expansions have been long relative to...

This paper considers the question in its title from several angles. Part 1 looks at economic history and the development of thinking about business cycles - the popular meaning and economists' definitions and ideas. Part 2 reviews the lessons from business cycle chronologies and duration data,...

This paper reports on a comprehensive study of the distributions of summary measures of error for a large collection of quarterly multiperiod predictions of six variables representing inflation, real qrowth, unemployment,and percentage changes in nominal GNP and two of its more volatile...

The targeted deficit reductions of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings (GRH) law are to be temporarily suspended in case of an official determination that real economic growth either (a) has been less than one percent in the two most recent reported quarters, or (b) is projected to be less than zero in...

Do business cycles have predictable periodicities or are they random walks without past regularities or predictive value? Arguments in support of either position are found in the literature, with no apparent convergence to an agreement. This paper first examines the implications of the NBER...

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...