Until the end of 1977, the U.S. consumer price index (CPI) for rents tended to omit rent increases when units had a change of tenants or were vacant, biasing inflation estimates downward. Beginning in 1978, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) implemented a series of methodological changes that...

In the late 1980s James Stock and Mark Watson developed for the U.S. economy an alternative coincident index to the one now published by the Conference Board. They used the Kalman filter to estimate a latent dynamic factor for the national economy and designated the common factor as the...

Since the 1950s the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has grouped the states into eight regions based primarily on cross-sectional similarities in their socioeconomic characteristics. This paper groups states into regions based on the similarities in their business cycles. We applied k-means...