Over the past 30 years, the three states of the Third Federal Reserve District have lost more than one-third of their manufacturing jobs. And that job loss has accelerated over the past 15 years. Despite this, the region's manufacturing output has expanded over the same period, although much...

If we want to know how things are going in the economy, which measures should we look at? Unemployment? GDP? Or something else? One solution is to combine several measures into a composite index of current or future economic activity. Several years ago, the Philadelphia Fed did just that for the...

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....