Until the end of 1977, the method used in the U.S. consumer price index (CPI) to measure rent inflation tended to omit rent increases when units had a change of tenants or were vacant. Since such units typically had more rapid increases in rents than average units, this response bias biased...

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 is the most frequently used grouping of states in the U.S. for economic analysis. Since several recent...

In the late 1980s James Stock and Mark Watson developed an alternative coincident index for the U.S. economy. They used the Kalman filter to estimate a latent dynamic factor for the national economy and designated the common factor as the coincident index. This paper uses the Stock/Watson...