Solutions For Academics

Resources available for Academics

ECRI provides chronologies of international business cycle dates used as the standard reference by many authorities, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, as well as selected papers on business cycles and turning point forecasting, and a recent book used as a supplementary college text. Teaching aids are also available.

ECRI's historical record of business cycle dates for 20 economies, including all the G7 countries, China and India, has been used as a standard benchmark by many authorities, including the U.S. Federal Reserve. In line with the approach used to determine the official business cycle dates for the United States, these international business cycle dates, along with corresponding growth rate cycle chronologies, are updated regularly by ECRI after the final data on key coincident economic indicators become available.

Publications on business cycles and turning point forecasting include selected ECRI's working papers and the recently published book, Beating the Business Cycle: How to Predict and Profit from Turning Points in the Economy, which is used as a supplementary college text.

In addition, we have a PowerPoint presentation available for classroom use.

How we help academics

Gaps in the literature

Standard economic texts give short shrift to the subject of business cycles, including the definition and prediction of recessions. At most, there may be an obligatory reference to the index of leading economic indicators (LEI), which was originally developed by ECRI's founder, Geoffrey H. Moore, four decades ago.

The LEI, modified several times since, failed to predict the last few recessions. Yet, more state-of-the-art approaches capable of real-time forecasting accuracy are routinely overlooked in the literature.

This lack of exposure has perpetuated both theoretical misconceptions about business cycles and the challenge of “predicting upper turning points” highlighted by the late Otto Eckstein decades ago. The result has often been misspecification of models of the business cycle, and, as an IMF study put it, a "virtually unblemished" record of failure to predict recessions.

The resources provided by ECRI, including international cycle dates, books, papers and teaching materials, help fill in these critical gaps in the academic literature.