The Leading Economic Indicators and Business Cycles in the United States: 100 Years of Empirical Evidence and the Opportunities for the Future

Describes the use of leading economic indicators as a tool for predicting business cycles
Offers a historical overview of the initial use of economic indicators by Wesley Mitchell and Arthur Burns alongside refinements and extensions by Geoffrey Moore and Victor Zarnowitz
Presents updated evidence of the continuing usefulness of the indicator approach today

John B. Guerard, Jr., Ph.D. is a member of the McKinley Capital Management Scientific Advisory Board. He served almost 15 years as Director of Quantitative Research at McKinley Capital Management, in Anchorage, Alaska. John is an Affiliate Instructor in the Department of Applied Mathematics, the Computational Finance and Risk Management Program, The University of Washington, Seattle, WA. He earned his AB in Economics from Duke University, MA in Economics from the University of Virginia, MSIM from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Texas, Austin. Mr. Guerard took three of his doctoral seminars at Texas from Jan Mossin, a co-developer of the Capital Asset Pricing model. John taught at the McIntire School of Commerce, the University of Virginia, Lehigh University, and Rutgers University. John taught as an adjunct faculty member at New York University, and the University of Pennsylvania. He worked with the DAIS Group at Drexel, Burnham, Lambert, Daiwa Securities Trust Company, where he co-managed the Japanese Equity Fund portfolio with Harry Markowitz. While serving as Director of Quantitative Research at Vantage Global Advisors, Mr. Guerard was awarded the first Moskowitz Prize for research in socially responsible investing. John has published several monographs, including Corporate Financial Policy and R&D Management (Wiley, 2006), Quantitative Corporate Finance (Kluwer, now Springer, 2007, with Eli Schwartz, the third edition is at press, 2021), The Handbook of Portfolio Construction: Contemporary Applications of Markowitz Techniques (Springer, 2010), Introduction to Financial Forecasting in Investment Analysis (Springer, 2013), and The Handbook of Applied Investment Research (World Scientific Publishing, 2020, with William T. Ziemba). John serves an Associate Editor of the Journal of Investing and The International Journal of Forecasting and has published research in The International Journal of Forecasting, Management Science, the IBM Journal of Research and Development, Annals of Operations Research, Journal of Forecasting, Journal of Investing, Journal of Portfolio Management, The Financial Analysts Journal, Research in Finance, Research Policy, and the Journal of the Operational Research Society.