Geoffrey H. Moore

Geoffrey H. Moore, (February 28, 1914 – March 9, 2000) was known as “the father of leading indicators,” and rose to prominence during a 30-year career at the National Bureau of Economic Research, that is the quasi-official arbiter of when recessions begin and end^[1].

Dr. Moore also became a prominent figure in academe and in Washington, where he served as commissioner^[2] of the Bureau of Labor Statistics during the Nixon administration.

One of his Statistics I students at New York University in 1946 was Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve^[3], who called his former teacher ''a major force in economic statistics and business-cycle research for more than a half-century.'' Mr. Greenspan told Congress in 1994 that he closely followed all of Dr. Moore's work, which focused mainly on economic fluctuations and ways of measuring them.

In 1996 Dr. Moore founded the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI)^[4] in New York, with his colleagues Anirvan Banerji and Lakshman Achuthan. Also in 1996, the American Economic Association named him Distinguished Fellow^[5], its highest honor.

Dr. Moore, a protege of Wesley Clair Mitchell and Arthur F. Burns, the founders of formal business cycle analysis, added much pioneering work of his own. For example, after the profession had responded to a Depression-era request by the Roosevelt administration to generate statistics that could point to revival, Dr. Moore enlarged on this work in 1950 to include economic downturns as well as recoveries.

Later he refined so-called diffusion indexes so that each of their disparate forecasting components could be seen in their own cyclical contexts, preventing distortions that would otherwise arise from comparing unlike factors.

Ultimately, the Commerce Department adopted as its own the series of leading, coincident and lagging economic indicators that Dr. Moore developed with Julius Shiskin, his predecessor as head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These indicators tend to warn of turning points in the economy by moving ahead of it or to confirm turns by moving at the same time or even lagging behind economic developments.

In his later years at ECRI, Dr. Moore spent much of his time developing forecasting indexes for inflation and extending his work on business cycles and forecasting indexes to dozens of other countries.

References

1. "Web". National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER. Retrieved 6 May 2016.
2. "Web". U.S. Department of Labor - Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retrieved 6 May 2016.
3. "Web". Federal Reserve History. Federal Reserve History. Retrieved 6 May 2016.
4. Hershey Jr., Robert D. "Geoffrey H. Moore, 86, Dies; An Analyst of Business Cycles". The New York Times. The New York Times. Retrieved 6 May 2016.
5. "Web". American Economic Association. American Economic Association. Retrieved 6 May 2016.