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...

The tradeoff between risk and return in equity markets is well established. This paper examines the existence of the same tradeoff in the single-family housing market. For home buyers, who constitute about two-thirds of U.S. households, the choice about how much housing and which house to buy is...

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....