The DOI matches its Crossref record.
New Indexes of Coincident and Leading Economic Indicators
Open accessAbstract
The system of Leading and Coincident Economic Indicators, currently maintained by the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC), was developed as part of the NBER research program on business cycles over fifty years ago. This paper uses recent developments in econometric methodology and computing technology to take a fresh look at this system. The result is three experimental indexes. The first, constructed using a dynamic factor model, is numerically similar to the current index of coincident indicators maintained by the DOC. The second, an alternative index of leading indicators, is designed to forecast the growth in the DOC index over a six month horizon. The third-a "Recession Index"-estimates the probability that the economy will be in a recession six months hence. Only two of the seven series in the proposed leading index are used by the DOC to construct their index. Of these new series, interest rates (a public-private risk premium and the slope of the yield curve) are found to be particularly useful predictors of future economic activity.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Production‐Based Asset Pricing and the Link Between Stock Returns and Economic Fluctuations
COCHRANE, J. H. (1991) · The Journal of Finance · doi:10.1111/j.1540-6261.1991.tb03750.x · Cited by 1,123
Monetary disturbances matter for business fluctuations in the G-7
Canova, F., & Nicoló, G. D. (2002) · Journal of Monetary Economics · doi:10.1016/s0304-3932(02)00145-9 · Cited by 750
Asset Pricing Models and Financial Market Anomalies
Avramov, D., & Chordia, T. (2006) · Review of Financial Studies · doi:10.1093/rfs/hhj025 · Cited by 523
Now-Casting and the Real-Time Data Flow
Bańbura, M., Giannone, D., Modugno, M., & Reichlin, L. (2013) · Handbook of Economic Forecasting · doi:10.1016/b978-0-444-53683-9.00004-9 · Cited by 448
Surprise and uncertainty indexes: Real-time aggregation of real-activity macro-surprises
Scotti, C. (2016) · Journal of Monetary Economics · doi:10.1016/j.jmoneco.2016.06.002 · Cited by 339
Metadata
- Authors
- Stock, J. H., & Watson, M. W.
- Venue
- NBER Macroeconomics Annual
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 1989-01
- Volume
- 4
- Pages
- 351-394
- ISSN
- 0889-3365 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-2642
- OpenAlex
- W2051794781
- Cited by
- 1,772
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 21.82
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: New Indexes of Coincident and Leading Economic Indicators. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/654119
- The paper
- Stock, J. H., & Watson, M. W. (1989). New Indexes of Coincident and Leading Economic Indicators. NBER Macroeconomics Annual. https://doi.org/10.1086/654119
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
