IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cwl/cwldpp/1368.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Mildest Recession: Outputs, Profits, and Stock Prices as the U.S. Emerges from the 2001 Recession

Author

Abstract

This essay examines the state of the United States economy as it emerges from the 2001 recession. A comparison of several central economic variables indicates that the 2001 recession was the mildest recession in the postwar period. In light of highly differentiated characteristics of recessions, the paper suggests that we differentiate among downturns by a five-category "recession severity scale," analogous to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. According to this approach, the 2001 recession fits in the least severe box, a "category I recession," along with the 1963 and 1967 non-recessions. The paper next examines the behavior of profits in recent years and shows that financial finagling has infected the aggregate profits numbers. Finally, the study constructs a measure of the forward-looking return on equities and concludes that the prospective real yield on equities in early 2002 is at its low point of the last half-century.

Suggested Citation

  • William D. Nordhaus, 2002. "The Mildest Recession: Outputs, Profits, and Stock Prices as the U.S. Emerges from the 2001 Recession," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1368, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    • Handle: RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:1368
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cowles.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/pub/d13/d1368.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Social democrats' structural failure
      by chris dillow in Stumbling and Mumbling on 2013-09-11 20:17:15

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Recession; Profits; Stock prices; Returns;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E3 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles
    • E4 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:1368. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Brittany Ladd (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cowleus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.