This paper examines the linkage between economic activity and tax revenues for New York State and New York City. Drawing upon the methodology of Stock and Watson, we use a dynamic single-factor model to estimate indexes of coincident economic indicators. We also construct measures of the sales...

The acceleration of productivity since 1995 has prompted a debate over whether the economy's underlying growth rate will remain high. In this paper, we propose a methodology for estimating trend growth that draws on growth theory to identify variables other than productivity - namely consumption...

This paper evaluates current strategies for the empirical modeling of forecast behavior. In particular, we focus on the reliability of using proxies from time series models of heteroskedasticity to describe changes in predictive confidence. We address this issue by examining the relationship...

This paper examines the ex post flexibility of U.S. labor contracts during the 1970-95 period by investigating whether unanticipated changes in inflation increase the likelihood of a contract being renegotiated prior to its expiration. We find strong empirical support for this hypothesis....

[...]In this article, we model the relationship between goodsinflation and services inflation from 1967:2 to 2002:4. To helpinform the inflation debate, we then use our results to forecastinflation for 2003. The specific inflation series that we model isthe quarterly change (at an annual rate)...

[...]This article describes a method by which we may moreaccurately predict regional economic activity. Specifically, wedevelop an index of leading economic indicators (LEI) forNew York State and for New Jersey over the 1972-99 period.We extend our earlier work (Orr, Rich, and Rosen 1999),...

[...]This article provides a systematic evaluation of severalproposed measures of U.S. core inflation: the popular ex foodand energy series, an ex energy series, a weighted median series,and an exponentially smoothed series. To inform the currentdebate on this issue, we adopt a general framework...