Economic trends and the Chicago Fed National Activity Index

This article discusses an experimental methodology for the Chicago Fed National Activity Index—a monthly index designed to gauge overall economic activity and inflationary pressure. The goal is to see how well it accounts for recent structural changes in the U.S. economy.Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI) ; Economic conditions

The Chicago Fed National Activity Index and business cycles

This article discusses how the Chicago Fed National Activity Index—a monthly index designed to gauge economic activity and related inflationary pressures—can be used as an indicator of business cycle turning points.Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI)

Federal Reserve policies and financial market conditions during the crisis

During the recent financial crisis, the Federal Reserve implemented a series of extraordinary and unconventional policies to alleviate the impact of the crisis on financial markets and the economy. In this paper, we examine the effects of these policies on broad financial market conditions, explicitly taking into account that policy was endogenously determined in response to prevailing financial market and economic conditions. We find that the Fed was more likely to initiate or expand new programs when financial market conditions were tighter than usual and economic conditions deteriorating. We also find that the Fed’s policies improved broad financial market conditions significantly at announcement and that the improvements were associated primarily with program initiations and expansions.Federal Reserve Act ; Financial crises - United States

Predicting gross state product growth with the Chicago Fed's Midwest Economy Index

This article explains how the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s Midwest Economy Index (MEI) can be used to produce quarterly estimates of the annual gross state product (GSP) growth of each state in the Seventh Federal Reserve District.Economic conditions - Federal Reserve District, 7th ; Federal Reserve District, 7th

Monitoring financial stability: a financial conditions index approach

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.Financial stability ; Financial crises ; Finance

Gathering insights on the forest from the trees: a new metric for financial conditions

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, or FCI, to the concept of a "financial crisis" using Markov-switching techniques. After demonstrating the ability of the index to capture "crisis" periods in U.S. financial history, we present several policy-geared threshold rules for the FCI using Receiver Operator Characteristics (ROC) curve analysis.Financial crises ; Financial markets

Chicago Fed National Activity Index turns ten - analyzing its first decade of performance

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

In search of a robust inflation forecast

It is difficult to consistently improve upon forecasts of inflation based solely on the most recent data on inflation. In this article, we show how to do so. Our main finding is that the most robust forecasts combine information from several different forecasting models, each of which incorporates the information in the available inflation indicators in different ways.Inflation (Finance)

A Practitioner's Guide and MATLAB Toolbox for Mixed Frequency State Space Models

The use of mixed frequency data is now common in many applications, ranging from the analysis of high frequency financial time series to large cross-sections of macroeconomic time series. In this article, we show how state space methods can easily facilitate both estimation and inference in these settings. After presenting a unified treatment of the state space approach to mixed frequency data modeling, we provide a series of applications to demonstrate how our MATLAB toolbox can make the estimation and post-processing of these models straightforward

Tangible interfaces for remote communication and collaboration

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1998.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-59).Scott Brenner Brave.M.S