On April 8–9, 2013, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s Detroit Branch hosted a two-day conference on the economic impacts of developments in domestic energy production. Recent technological advances in the ability to extract natural gas and other fuels from shale rock are already having...

Industrial production long was the heartbeat of the Midwest economy. As that industry’s role in the region diminishes, policymakers have explored new directions. At a series of conferences, local experts discussed the potential of the biotech industry as the Midwest’s next frontier.

On April 24–25, 2007, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Detroit Regional Chamber sponsored a two-day forum examining a “value chain” perspective of health care delivery in the U.S. The program discussed how a value chain evaluation might lead to improvement in health care...

The authors examine the apparent lack of high-skilled workers for the U.S. manufacturing sector by focusing on the educational attainment and wage compensation of manufacturing workers and their nonmanufacturing counterparts over the period 1990–2007.

A recent Chicago Fed conference looked at the shifting geography of company headquarters, with a public policy focus on headquarters as a much-desired target of economic development efforts.

The Chicago Fed convened a series of conferences in 2003–04 to address the following three questions: What are the long-term underlying trends in manufacturing and have they fundamentally changed in recent years? Second, is the poor performance of recent years a transitory phenomenon? And,...