When Does a Recession Become Official?

Let’s say you’re an armchair economist and you think the U.S. economy is already in a recession (as many people do). Or maybe you’re sure it’s still growing. Either way, you would love to serve on the committee that makes the semiofficial determinations of when recessions begin and end.

Sorry, no applications are being accepted. Robert Hall, a Stanford and Hoover Institution economist who has chaired the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research since its inception in 1978, told Bloomberg in 2018 that to be on the committee, you have to be an academic macroeconomist with a strong track record of business cycle research, and even then you can’t nominate yourself.

“It would be very unfortunate if somebody called me up or called up James Poterba and said, ‘I want to be on the committee,’” Hall said. Poterba is the N.B.E.R.’s president. “That would be — that’s just not the way people behave,” Hall said. “They wait for us to call them.”

But you don’t need to be a committee member to take a crack at doing what the committee does. You can look at the six economic indicators the committee says it mainly relies on and decide whether the economy is in or near a recession. (The committee itself doesn’t make its decisions until long after recessions have begun or ended, allowing time for the data to be fully vetted.)

By the bureau’s definition, a recession is “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.”

Unlike most, the Covid recession of 2020 did not last “more than a few months.” It started in February and ended in April. The first package of charts shows how the six indicators the committee focuses on have changed since the end of that recession.