We document racial differences in retail prices paid for physically identical products. Black households pay 2.0 percent higher prices than white households, and Hispanic households pay 0.8 percent higher prices. This difference suggest that conventional measures of racial income differences...

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

The authors present a model in which anticipated future tax cuts, like those promised during the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign, generate a contraction in economic activity with some of the atypical features observed during the 2001 recession (such as its relatively strong consumption and home...

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...

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,...