This paper reviews some of China’s high frequency economic indicators and our principal findings on their selection and use. Our aim is to develop a composite index of coincident indicators (CEI) which can be used to obtain timely information on the present state of the China’s economy and...

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 U.S. and some other countries, composite indexes of coincident indicators (CEI) are used to date classical business cycle turning...

The usual practice in economic forecasting is to report point predictions without specifying the attached probabilities. Periodic surveys of such forecasts produce group averages, which are taken to indicate the "consensus" of experts. Measures of the dispersion of individual forecasts around...

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...