Julius Shiskin

[4] Shiskin was born in New York on October 13, 1912, and completed his primary education in New Jersey[5] where he graduated from Rutgers University.

From 1938 through 1942, he worked as a staff assistant for the National Bureau of Economic Research,[4] and from 1942 to 1945 he was the chief economist for the War Production Board.

He played a crucial role in the creation of a computerised technique for seasonally adjusting economic time series and was a significant contributor to the advancement of the business-cycle statistics program.

Shiskin joined the Office of Management and Budget in 1969 and assumed the role of Commissioner of Labour Statistics in 1973.

Since 1978, however, the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research has "called" recession starts and ends, which it defines as "a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months" and involves examination of the depth, diffusion, and duration of the decline.