The authors present an alternative version of the Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI), which is constructed using a methodology that allows for a more robust treatment of the underlying data series than its traditional methodology. This alternative CFNAI produces superior predictions of...

The authors analyze the usefulness of a new measure of nonfinancial leverage as an early warning indicator for financial instability and its consequences for economic growth.

We approach the task of monitoring financial stability within a framework that balances the costs and benefits of identifying future crisis-like conditions based on past U.S. financial crises. Our results indicate that the National Financial Conditions Index (NFCI) produced by the Federal...

Monitoring financial stability requires an understanding of both how traditional and evolving financial markets relate to each other and how they relate to economic conditions. This article describes two new indexes of financial conditions that aim to quantify these relationships.

By incorporating the Harvey accumulator into the large approximate dynamic factor framework of Doz et al. (2006), we are able to construct a coincident index of financial conditions from a large unbalanced panel of mixed frequency financial indicators. We relate our financial conditions index,...

This article discusses how the Chicago Fed National Activity Index has performed as a “real-time” indicator of economic activity and related inflationary pressure.

Mixed frequency Bayesian vector autoregressions (MF-BVARs) allow forecasters to incorporate a large number of mixed frequency indicators into forecasts of economic activity. This paper evaluates the forecast performance of MF-BVARs relative to surveys of professional forecasters and investigates...

We leverage an event-study research design focused on the seven costliest hurricanes to hit the US mainland since 2004 to identify the elasticity of unemployment insurance filings with respect to search intensity. Applying our elasticity estimate to the state-level Google Trends indexes for the...