Cycles in the Transportation Sector and the Aggregate Economy

Kajal Lahiri, Vincent Yao and Peg Young

Discussion Papers from University at Albany, SUNY, Department of Economics

Abstract: Transportation plays a central role in facilitating economic activities across sectors and between regions, and is thus essential to business cycle research. Using four coincident indicators representing different aspects of the transportation sector that include an index of transportation output, payroll, personal consumption and employment, we define the classical business cycle and growth cycle chronologies for this sector. We find 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 transportation business cycles, growth slowdowns in this sector also last longer than the economy-wide slowdowns by a few months. This study underscores the importance of transportation indicators in monitoring cyclical movements in the aggregate economy. (Keywords: Business cycle, Composite coincident index, Dynamic factor model, Regime switching, Growth cycle)

Date: 2003
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.albany.edu/economics/research/workingp/2003/TRB2004.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.albany.edu/economics/research/workingp/2003/TRB2004.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.albany.edu/economics/research/workingp/2003/TRB2004.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nya:albaec:03-14

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
Department of Economics, Building 25, Room 103 University at Albany State University of New York Albany, NY 12222 U.S.A.
http://www.albany.ed ... workingp/index.shtml

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from University at Albany, SUNY, Department of Economics Department of Economics, Building 25, Room 103 University at Albany State University of New York Albany, NY 12222 U.S.A..
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Byoung Park ().