In "Taking the Measure of Manufacturing" Tim Schiller and Mike Trebing outline several of the most important surveys and indexes that track manufacturing, describe their similarities and differences, and discuss their usefulness in providing timely and accurate data on the sector.

In the final article this quarter, Aubhik Khan wonders: What determines whether a manufacturing plant survives? Is it access to credit markets? Or does learning about plants' profitability over time determine survival? Should government policy play a role in helping plants survive? In...

In recent years, the Philadelphia Fed’s Business Outlook Survey (BOS) has received a great deal of attention from financial journalists and market participants. The monthly survey gathers information from manufacturers in the Third Federal Reserve District about current conditions at their...

Over the past 30 years, the three states of the Third Federal Reserve District have lost more than one-third of their manufacturing jobs. And that job loss has accelerated over the past 15 years. Despite this, the region's manufacturing output has expanded over the same period, although much...

China's emergence as a manufacturing juggernaut selling so many goods to so many countries has attracted enormous attention from academics, policymakers, and the media. In this article, Behzad Kianian and Kei-Mu Yi put China's manufacturing performance into a broader context. They emphasize two...

The idea of creating a framework for explicit inflation targeting in the U.S. has recently become a topic of considerable discussion. The key question is: Could inflation targeting improve on the U.S. economy's performance? President Anthony Santomero thinks inflation targeting makes sense for...

The subject of our next article, "The Taylor Curve and the Unemployment-Inflation Tradeoff," by Satyajit Chatterjee, is finding an optimal monetary policy menu. In the past, monetary policy options were described in terms of a tradeoff between the unemployment rate and the inflation rate, the...