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US Business Cycles

A CodeSights flagship for the economics and analytics crowd: 49 US recessions from the Panic of 1785 to the 2020 COVID downturn, each with its duration in months, the length of the expansion that preceded it, the peak-to-trough decline in output and, for the modern era, peak unemployment. Built from the three era tables of the NBER-based list (the chronology runs monthly from 1854 and is extended back to 1785 by Thorp and Zarnowitz), reading duration and the preceding expansion straight from each cell's sort value in months. The famous finding is the Great Moderation: group by era and recessions grow shorter while the expansions between them stretch out, from a mean 20-month recession after a 26-month expansion in the Free Banking era to a 13-month recession after a 61-month expansion in the modern era. The 2020 COVID recession is the outlier that proves the rule, the shortest on record at two months yet one of the sharpest, and it arrived after the longest expansion ever measured at 128 months. The Great Depression remains the deepest at 43 months with unemployment of 24.9 percent, and the longest single contraction was the 1815 to 1821 depression at 72 months. Nine acceptance tests anchored on the Depression, the Great Recession and COVID.
49 rows 1 file last pulled 2026-10-16
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_States
Recessions 49 rows × 12 columns
RecessionRecession_IDEraStart_YearEnd_YearPeak_MonthDuration_MonthsExpansion_Before_MonthsGDP_Decline_PctPeak_Unemployment_PctCharacteristicsRecession_URL

Questions and answers

What is the US Business Cycles dataset?

A CodeSights flagship for the economics and analytics crowd: 49 US recessions from the Panic of 1785 to the 2020 COVID downturn, each with its duration in months, the length of the expansion that preceded it, the peak-to-trough decline in output and, for the modern era, peak unemployment. Built from the three era tables of the NBER-based list (the chronology runs monthly from 1854 and is extended back to 1785 by Thorp and Zarnowitz), reading duration and the preceding expansion straight from each cell's sort value in months. The famous finding is the Great Moderation: group by era and recessions grow shorter while the expansions between them stretch out, from a mean 20-month recession after a 26-month expansion in the Free Banking era to a 13-month recession after a 61-month expansion in the modern era. The 2020 COVID recession is the outlier that proves the rule, the shortest on record at two months yet one of the sharpest, and it arrived after the longest expansion ever measured at 128 months. The Great Depression remains the deepest at 43 months with unemployment of 24.9 percent, and the longest single contraction was the 1815 to 1821 depression at 72 months. Nine acceptance tests anchored on the Depression, the Great Recession and COVID.

How big is the US Business Cycles dataset?

49 rows in one CSV file, with 12 columns in total: Recession, Recession_ID, Era, Start_Year, End_Year, Peak_Month, Duration_Months, Expansion_Before_Months, GDP_Decline_Pct, Peak_Unemployment_Pct, Characteristics, Recession_URL.

Where does the data come from?

It is built by programmatically scraping en.wikipedia.org, last pulled on 2026-10-16. Datasets are versioned; older versions stay downloadable.

Is the dataset free to download?

Yes. Every CodeSights dataset is completely free as a CSV download; a free account is all it takes. Anyone can preview the data without signing in.

Can I see the code that built this dataset?

Yes. The exact Python scraper that built it is viewable on the dataset page by any signed-in member, so every number is reproducible.

Can the data contain errors?

Automated scraping leaves room for error and the underlying sources change over time, so no version is guaranteed accurate or complete. If a number matters, verify it against the original source.

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