Using the same approach, ECRI has long determined recession start and end dates for over 20 other countries that are widely accepted by academics and major central banks as the definitive international business cycle chronologies Archived August 6, 2020, at the Wayback Machine.
[6] In 1920, Wesley C. Mitchell and his colleagues established the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), with a primary objective of investigating business cycles.
[13] In 1968, Moore gave over to the U.S. government the original composite leading, coincident, and lagging indexes, which the United States Department of Commerce adopted (and published regularly in Business Cycle Developments (BCD), soon renamed Business Conditions Digest), with the Index of Leading Economic Indicators (LEI) becoming its main forecasting gauge.
[17] In 1996, Moore, with his protégés, Lakshman Achuthan and Anirvan Banerji, established the independent Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI), which virtually all of their CIBCR colleagues then joined.
"[18] However, The Economist noted in 2005 that "ECRI is perhaps the only organisation to give advance warning of each of the past three recessions; just as impressive, it has never issued a false alarm.
"[22] 2007-09 recession and recovery calls: In January 2008, it said Weekly Leading Index growth "has now dropped to a new six-year low.
[23] In March 2008, "the Economic Cycle Research Institute made its official call, stating that the U.S. economy had "unambiguously" entered a recession.
2020 recession and recovery calls: On March 17, 2020, with U.S. states about to issue stay-at-home orders, ECRI wrote that "cascading closures across the economy will necessarily cause a breakdown in demand."
[30] But on April 3, 2020, ECRI wrote that "this recession will be extremely deep, very broad, but relatively brief," as "shutdowns start ebbing" in short order.