This paper examines and compares the recent business cycle experiences of the seven states that lie partly or wholly within the Eighth Federal Reserve District (Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee). For the period surrounding the 1990-91 NBER recession,...

This paper examines the determinants of employment growth in metro areas. To obtain growth rates, we use a Markov-switching model that separates a city’s growth path into two distinct phases (high and low), each with its own growth rate. The simple average growth rate over some period is,...

The U.S. aggregate business cycle is often characterized as a series of distinct recession and expansion phases. We apply a regime-switching model to state-level coincident indexes to characterize state business cycles in this way. We find that states differ a great deal in the levels of growth...

The national economy is often described as having a business cycle over which aggregate output enters and exits distinct expansion and recession phases. Analogously, national employment cycles in and out of its own expansion and contraction phases, which are closely related to the business...

A number of studies have documented a reduction in aggregate macroeconomic volatility beginning in the early 1980s. Using an empirical model of business cycles, we extend this line of research to state-level employment data and find significant heterogeneity in the timing and magnitude of the...

"This paper examines and compares the recent business cycle experiences of the seven states that lie partly or wholly within the Eighth Federal Reserve District (Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee). For the period surrounding the 1990-91 NBER recession,...

Studies of the predictive ability of the Federal Reserve's Beige Book, an anecdotal measure of regional economic conditions, for aggregate output and employment have proven inconclusive. This might be attributed, in part, to the irregular release schedule of the Beige Book. In this paper, we use...

We model the U.S. business cycle using a dynamic factor model that identifies common factors underlying fluctuations in state-level income and employment growth. We find three such common factors, each of which is associated with a set of factor loadings that indicate the extent to which each...

We find that the magnitudes of the regional effects of monetary policy were considerably dampened during the Volcker-Greenspan era. Further, regional differences in the depths of monetary-policy-induced recessions are related to the concentration of the banking sector, whereas differences in the...