The personal site of Cvet Georgiev

Recession timing in Canada

While digging through recession data for Canada I stumbled on this tip-bit: if you sort the number of days between recession dates in ascending order you will find the following quadratic function.

The longest number of days between recessions was 6027 days ( ~16.5 years) while the shortest was 365 days or just 1 year.

On average Canada experiences a recession every 2315 days or 6 years and 4 months (estimated using a non-parametric regression). The last recession ended exactly 3416 days ago. Enough said.

1 Comment

  1. Jay

    Hi Cvet,

    Never “enough said”. Thanks for this posting!

    I have been wondering when the next recession (or downturn) would come along. For some reason, right after the turn of a decade seemed to be common wisdom, though of course the last time for that (2011) saw the downturn well under way — in a quite atypical way. As we know. And too, I have wondered about whether we would get a bit of inflationary rush beforehand, as things peaked before the next drop. Likely, though the current uncertainties in the world may keep everyone guessing for a while yet.

    I had never heard about the quadratic equation finding. Very neat.

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