Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. With the increasing importance of the service-providing sectors, information from these sectors has become essential to the understanding of contemporary business cycles. This paper explores the usefulness of the transportation services output index (TSI) as an additional coincident indicator in determining the peaks and troughs of U.S. economy. The index represents a service sector that plays a central role in facilitating economic activities between sectors and across regions, and can be useful in monitoring the current state of the economy. We evaluate the marginal contribution of the TSI in identifying cyclical turning points in the context of four currently used NBER indicators. The TSI is found to have advantages over the composite index of coincident indicators in identifying turning points, and has been of critical importance in recent recessions.
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Documents inJEL-Code: E320, C100.
This paper studies the business cycle features of the transportation sector using dynamic factor models. The transportation reference cycles peak ahead of the economic cycles, but lag by a few months at troughs. The asymmetric relationship between these two suggests the usefulness of transportation in monitoring business cycles.
A monthly output index for the US Transportation sector over January 1979-June 2003 is reported covering air, rail, water, truck, transit and pipeline activities. Separate indexes for freight and passenger are also constructed. The strong cyclical movements observed in the transportation output appear to be well synchronized with the NBER-defined recessions and growth slowdowns of the US economy. The series reflects the profound impact of 9/11 on the transportation sector, especially on the airlines. By December 2002 it has reached its historical peak. Given the observed relationship of the transportation output with the economy, the recent upward trend in the freight transportation strongly suggests that both the sector and the overall economy have recovered from their latest slump.
Transportation plays a central role in facilitating economic activities across sectors and between regions and is essential to business-cycle research. With four coincident indicators that represent different aspects of the transportation sector—an index of transportation output, payroll, personal consumption, and employment—the classical business-cycle and growth-cycle chronologies are defined for this sector. It is found that, relative to the economy, business cycles in the transportation sector have an average lead of nearly 6 months at peaks and an average lag of 2 months at troughs. Similar to its business cycles, growth slowdowns in the transportation sector also last longer than the economywide slowdowns by a few months. This study underscores the importance of transportation indicators in monitoring cyclical movements in the aggregate economy.
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