Stock-Watson Experimental Coincident, Leading and Recession Indexes

2024, Dataset: "After 14 years and 6 months of monthly releases, we have retired the Stock-Watson XRI and related series. The last monthly release was for December 2003. One important purpose of the monthly XRI reports was to provide interested entities with forecasts about the current and future state of the business cycle. A second important purpose was to establish a real-time public forecasting record that could serve as the basis for further research and revision. We believe that we have achieved these two objectives. Over the past decade, there has been considerable progress on “next generation” methods for assessing the current state of the business cycle and for making near-term forecasts. Some of this research has produced new real-time indexes. The most direct successor of the Stock-Watson indexes is the Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI), a monthly index constructed using 85 monthly indicators based on an extension of the methodology used to construct the original Stock-Watson XCI."