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...

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...

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 paper groups states into regions based on the similarities in their business cycles. We applied k-means...

Until the end of 1977, the U.S. consumer price index for rents tended to omit rent increases when units had a change of tenants or were vacant, biasing inflation estimates downward. Beginning in 1978, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) implemented a series of methodological changes that...

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.

Many policymakers and business persons are interested not only in the course of the national economy but also in the prospects for their region's economy. Since 1994, the Philadelphia Fed has published monthly indexes of coincident indicators for the states in the Third Federal Reserve District....