University of Oregon

Smoothed U.S. Recession Probabilities from Piger Data cited at: Piger, Jeremy Max and Chauvet, Marcelle, Smoothed U.S. Recession Probabilities - https://pages.uoregon.edu/jpiger/us_recession_probs.htm/ A smoothed recession probability is based on the most recent data available, and is thus potentially influenced by data that wasn’t available the first time a recession probability for a particular month was calculated. Smoothed recession probabilities will be revised over time as additional data becomes available, and as initially released data is revised. The effect of these revisions is to “smooth” away some of the spikes in the recession probabilities that occur in real time.  By contrast, a “real-time” recession probability is the first probability of recession that one could obtain for a given month. Note that the most recent smoothed probability is also a real-time probability.