Once again it is a pleasure to have this opportunity to speak to members of the ABE. I believe – I hope correctly – that business economists share our interest in seeking out practical policy responses to our problems. Today, I would like to offer some comments on current economic trends and their implications for policy. They will have a familiar ring to many of you. Looking back for a moment,...

Methods are described for extracting the trend from an economic data sequence and for isolating the cycles that surround it. The latter often consist of a business cycle of variable duration and a perennial seasonal cycle. There is no evident point in the frequency spectrum where the trend ends and the business cycle begins. Therefore, unless it can be represented by a simple analytic function,...

This article reports data concerning the Internet-related activities and interest for Ironman Triathlon competition. Google Trends (GT) was used and mined from 2004 onwards. The interest for Ironman Triathlon was found to be cyclic over time. The Triathlon-related Internet activities negatively correlated with the number of finishers per year (Pearson׳s correlation r=-0.690, p-value<0.05), whil...

This paper proposes a method to automatically extract basis expressions that indicate economic trends from newspaper articles by using a statistical method. We also propose a method to classify them into positive expressions that indicate upbeat, and negative expressions that indicate downturn in economy, respectively. It is important for companies, governments and investors to predict economic...