Question

A criticism of the National Bureau of Economic Research's business cycle dating committee is that it: Question 2 options: a) makes little use of the national income and product accounts. b) makes premature judgments as to the turning points of the business cycle. c) dates peaks and troughs only after the fact. d) does not update or revise data.

Answer 1

Answer: c) Dates peaks and troughs only after the fact .

The NBER dating committee maintains a chronology of the business cycles in US. The data consists of the dates of the peaks and troughs in economic activity.  

The NBER dating committee does not provide the data ahead of a recession or expansion, rather it functions as a historian of recording the peaks and troughs in economic activity.

The NBER dating committee reconciles several data before actually determining and announcing the month a recession started. The decision is based on several economic indicators that are very frequently revised. The economic estimate that has the most number of revisions is the GDP estimate. The NBER takes all the revisions made to the economic indicators including the GDP and then provides the month a recession started or ended. This is the main reason for the delay in determining the month a recession began or ended.  

Hence this is one of the criticisms leveled against the NBER dating committee.

Answer 2

The answer is: c) dates peaks and troughs only after the fact.

This mean that millions of dollar spents by the Bureau cannot necessarily used to address the economic problems that people currently face.

One argument to counter such criticism is that the data from the Bureau could be used to make future predicitons and prevent any mistakes in the past from occuring again in the future.