IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/11157.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

An Improved Annual Chronology of U.S. Business Cycles since the 1790's

Author

Listed:
  • Joseph H. Davis

Abstract

The NBER's pre-WWI chronology of annual peaks and troughs has the remarkable implication that the U.S. economy spent nearly every other year in recession, although previous research has argued that the post-Civil War dates are flawed. This paper extends that research by redating annual peaks and troughs for the entire 1796-1914 period using a single metric: Davis' (2004) annual industrial production index. The new pre-WWI chronology alters more than 40% of the peak and troughs, and removes cycles long considered the most questionable. An important implication of the new chronology is the lack of discernible differences in the frequency and duration of industrial cycles among the pre-Civil War, Civil War to WWI, and post-WWII periods. Of course, my comparison between pre-WWI and post-WWII cycles is limited by its reliance on a single annual index (as opposed to many monthly series) that is less comprehensive than GDP.

Suggested Citation

  • Joseph H. Davis, 2005. "An Improved Annual Chronology of U.S. Business Cycles since the 1790's," NBER Working Papers 11157, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:11157
    Note: DAE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w11157.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Diebold, Francis X & Rudebusch, Glenn D, 1992. "Have Postwar Economic Fluctuations Been Stabilized?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 82(4), pages 993-1005, September.
    2. Romer, Christina D., 1994. "Remeasuring Business Cycles," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 54(3), pages 573-609, September.
    3. Wesley C. Mitchell, 1926. "Introduction: Business Cycles as Revealed by Business Annals," NBER Chapters, in: Business Annals, pages 15-100, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Balke, Nathan S & Gordon, Robert J, 1989. "The Estimation of Prewar Gross National Product: Methodology and New Evidence," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 97(1), pages 38-92, February.
    5. Frederic S. Mishkin, 1991. "Asymmetric Information and Financial Crises: A Historical Perspective," NBER Chapters, in: Financial Markets and Financial Crises, pages 69-108, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Jeffrey C. Fuhrer & Scott Schuh, 1998. "Beyond shocks: what causes business cycles?," Conference Series ; [Proceedings], Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, issue jun.
    7. R. Glenn Hubbard, 1991. "Financial Markets and Financial Crises," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number glen91-1, March.
    8. Arthur F. Burns & Wesley C. Mitchell, 1946. "Measuring Business Cycles," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number burn46-1, March.
    9. Paul W. Rhode, 2002. "Gallman's Annual Output Series for the United States, 1834-1909," NBER Working Papers 8860, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Paul A. Samuelson, 1998. "Summing up on business cycles: opening address," Conference Series ; [Proceedings], Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, vol. 42(Jun), pages 33-36.
    11. Willard Long Thorp, 1926. "Business Annals," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number thor26-1, March.
    12. Douglas A. Irwin & Joseph H. Davis, 2003. "Trade Disruptions and America's Early Industrialization," NBER Working Papers 9944, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bruce T. Grimm, 2005. "Alternative Measures of U.S. Economic Activity in Business Cycles and Business Cycle Dating," BEA Papers 0052, Bureau of Economic Analysis.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Olivier Darné & Amélie Charles & Claude Diebolt, 2014. "A revision of the US business-cycles chronology 1790-1928," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 34(1), pages 234-244.
    2. Charles, Amélie & Darné, Olivier & Diebolt, Claude & Ferrara, Laurent, 2015. "A new monthly chronology of the US industrial cycles in the prewar economy," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 17(C), pages 3-9.
    3. Charles W. Calomiris & Christopher Hanes, 1994. "Historical Macroeconomics and American Macroeconomic History," NBER Working Papers 4935, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Christina D. Romer, 1999. "Changes in Business Cycles: Evidence and Explanations," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 13(2), pages 23-44, Spring.
    5. Maurizio Bovi, 2003. "Nonparametric Analysis Of The International Business Cycles," ISAE Working Papers 37, ISTAT - Italian National Institute of Statistics - (Rome, ITALY).
    6. Cover, James P. & Pecorino, Paul, 2005. "The length of US business expansions: When did the break in the data occur?," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 27(3), pages 452-471, September.
    7. Joseph H. Davis & Christopher Hanes & Paul W. Rhode, 2009. "Harvests and Business Cycles in Nineteenth-Century America," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 124(4), pages 1675-1727.
    8. Marco Gallegati & Mauro Gallegati, 2005. "Wavelet variance and correlation analyses of output in G7 countries," Macroeconomics 0512017, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    9. Sergey V. Smirnov & Nikolay V. Kondrashov & Anna V. Petronevich, 2017. "Dating Cyclical Turning Points for Russia: Formal Methods and Informal Choices," Journal of Business Cycle Research, Springer;Centre for International Research on Economic Tendency Surveys (CIRET), vol. 13(1), pages 53-73, May.
    10. L.A. Gil-Alana, 2005. "Fractional Cyclical Structures & Business Cycles in the Specification of the US Real Output," European Research Studies Journal, European Research Studies Journal, vol. 0(1-2), pages 99-126.
    11. Guglielmo Caporale & Luis Gil-Alana, 2006. "Long memory at the long run and at the cyclical frequencies: modelling real wages in England, 1260–1994," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 31(1), pages 83-93, March.
    12. McKay, Alisdair & Reis, Ricardo, 2008. "The brevity and violence of contractions and expansions," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 55(4), pages 738-751, May.
    13. Guglielmo Caporale & Luis Gil-Alana, 2016. "Persistence and cyclical dependence in the monthly euribor rate," Journal of Economics and Finance, Springer;Academy of Economics and Finance, vol. 40(1), pages 157-171, January.
    14. Bertrand Candelon & Luis A. Gil-Alana, 2004. "Fractional integration and business cycle features," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 29(2), pages 343-359, May.
    15. Caporale, Guglielmo Maria & Gil-Alana, Luis A., 2014. "Persistence and cycles in US hours worked," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 38(C), pages 504-511.
    16. U. Michael Bergman & Michael D. Bordo & Lars Jonung, 1998. "Historical evidence on business cycles: the international experience," Conference Series ; [Proceedings], Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, vol. 42(Jun), pages 65-119.
    17. Zarnowitz, Victor & Ozyildirim, Ataman, 2006. "Time series decomposition and measurement of business cycles, trends and growth cycles," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(7), pages 1717-1739, October.
    18. Charlotte Le Chapelain, 2012. "Allocation des talents et accumulation de capital humain en France à la fin du XIXe siècle," Working Papers 12-03, Association Française de Cliométrie (AFC).
    19. Selgin, George & Lastrapes, William D. & White, Lawrence H., 2012. "Has the Fed been a failure?," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 34(3), pages 569-596.
    20. James L. Butkiewicz & Kim Lane Leong Long, 2003. "Predicting Interwar Business Cycles with the Interest Rate Yield Spread," Working Papers 03-07, University of Delaware, Department of Economics.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • N1 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Industrial Structure; Growth; Fluctuations
    • E3 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:11157. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.