"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...

When regional economists study the interaction of multi-state regions in the U.S., they typically use the regional divisions developed by the U.S. Bureau of the Census or the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). The current census divisions were adopted in 1910 and divide the states into nine...