Where To Find Business Cycle Dates For Different Economies

 

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Where To Find Business Cycle Dates For Different Economies 

​Using (roughly) the Burns-Mitchell-NBER approach. Incomplete listing, focused on those updated over time, by agencies, firms, or other organizations.

For single economies:

• United States (NBER)
• Euro area (CEPR/EABCN) [latest]
• France (Fr.Econ.Assn.)
• Japan (Cabinet Office) [chronology] (note: this is a government agency source)
• United Kingdom (NIESR) [chronology]

Cross country:

• Economic Cycle Research Institute [chronology (PDF)]
• OECD (includes non-OECD economies, aggregates)
• Conference Board (US)

The methodologies differ, with varying degrees of judgmental input and input series; some observations in this post. In Chinn and Kucko (2015), we relied upon the ECRI chronologies. There are numerous other approaches, including for the US Jim Hamilton’s time series approach applied to GDP [latest announcement].

As an aside, here are six key macro indicators (at monthly frequency, as of 6/4) followed by the NBER BCDC:

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Figure 1: Nonfarm payroll employment from May release (dark blue), Bloomberg consensus as of 6/1 for May nonfarm payroll employment (light blue +), industrial production (red), personal income excluding transfers in Ch.2012$ (green), manufacturing and trade sales in Ch.2012$ (black), consumption in Ch.2012$ (light blue), and monthly GDP in Ch.2012$ (pink), all log normalized to 2020M02=0. Source: BLS, Federal Reserve, BEA, via FRED, IHS Markit (nee Macroeconomic Advisers) (6/1/2021 release), NBER, and author’s calculations.

Any leads to other agency/organization chronologies welcome.

Other individual studies discussed on Econbrowser:

• Ferrara on Germany.
• Hamilton discusses Stock/Watson.
• Frankel on when negative growth is too rare (or common).