The authors introduce a new index of the business cycle that uses the Mahalanobis distance to measure the statistical similarity of current economic conditions to past episodes of recession and robust growth. Their index has several important features that distinguish it from the Conference...

We argue that the correct identification of monetary policy shocks in a vector autoregression requires that the identification scheme distinguishes between permanent and transitory monetary policy shocks. The permanent shocks reflect changes in the inflation target while the transitory shocks...