Synchronized expansions and contractions across sectors define business cycles. Yet synchronization is puzzling because productivity across sectors exhibits weak correlation. While previous work examined production complementarity, our analysis explores complementarity in information acquisition. Because information about future productivity has a high fixed cost of production and a low marginal cost of replication, sectors can share the cost to forecast their sector-specific productivity. Sectors with common, aggregate information make highly correlated productions choices. By filtering out sector-specific shocks and transmitting aggregate ones, information markets amplify business-cycle comovement.

The inability of forecasters to predict accurately the 1990-1991 recession emphasizes the need for better ways for charting the course of the economy. In this volume, leading economists examine forecasting techniques developed over the past ten years, compare their performance to traditional econometric models, and discuss new methods for forecasting and time series analysis.

Measuring Entrepreneurial Businesses: Current Knowledge and Challenges brings together and unprecedented group of economists, data providers, and data analysts to discuss research on the state of entrepreneurship and to address the challenges in understanding this dynamic part of the economy. Each chapter addresses the challenges of measuring entrepreneurship and how entrepreneurial firms contribute to economies and standards of living. The book also investigates heterogeneity in entrepreneurs, challenges experienced by entrepreneurs over time, and how much less we know than we think about entrepreneurship given data limitations. This volume will be a groundbreaking first serious look into entrepreneurship in the NBER's Income and Wealth series.

Non-competitive conduct can be assessed by estimating the size of the markup or Lerner index achieved in a market. The markup implies a price elasticity of demand faced by the representative firm. For a given markup, non-competitive conduct is greater the more elastic is the market elasticity of demand. The ratio of the firm's to the market elasticity is a measure of non-competitive conduct that is insensitive to the value of the monopoly. To implement this measure, both the firm's and the market elasticities of demand must be estimated. Hall shows how to estimate the markup, and hence the elasticity faced by the firm, from the cyclical behavior of productivity. To estimate the market elasticity, an instrumental variables procedure exploiting a covariance restriction between productivity shocks and demand shocks is used. Results for broad sectors of private industry and for non-durable manufacturing industries display a wide range of monopoly power.