"What Test Scores Can and Cannot Tell Us about the Quality of Our Schools," by Ted Crone, recognizes that how to best judge the quality of our schools is a thorny issue. The No Child Left Behind Act, which was signed into law in January 2002, mandates standardized testing in math and reading for...

Do house prices reflect the quality of the local public schools? To what extent do school district policies determine how well students perform? How do such factors as neighborhood, family, and peers affect school quality and house prices? Ted Crone examines these questions, and others, to...

Several years ago, the Philadelphia Fed developed a small forecasting model for each of the three states in the Third Federal Reserve DistrictCPennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. This article introduces a similar model that forecasts major economic variables for the Philadelphia metropolitan...

In "The Changing Faces of the Third District: A Snapshot of the Region from the 2000 Census," Ted Crone describes some of these patterns and tells us what they mean for economic growth in this region.

Most discussions of business cycles focus on the national economy. But regional cycles are also important, and they can vary significantly from one region to another. Analysis of regional cycles can help businesses plan investments and project sales, among other things. A look at the economies...

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...

If we want to know how things are going in the economy, which measures should we look at? Unemployment? GDP? Or something else? One solution is to combine several measures into a composite index of current or future economic activity. Several years ago, the Philadelphia Fed did just that for the...

Although there is only one national monetary policy, that does not mean that monetary policy does not affect some regions of the country more than others. We know that business cycles differ across states and regions, and a number of studies have examined how monetary policy may affect regions...

Ted Crone presents information on a recently constructed set of coincident indexes for the 50 states. These indexes can be used to define business cycles at the state level and can tell us how business cycles and the overall patterns of growth have differed among the states.