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Working Paper
Capitalization of the quality of local public schools: what do home buyers value?
The expansion of state-mandated tests in the 1990s and the testing requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act have supplied researchers with an abundance of data on test scores that can be used as measures of school quality. This paper uses the state-mandated test scores for 5th grade and 11th grade in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, to examine three issues about the capitalization of school quality into house prices: (1) At what level do prospective home buyers evaluate the quality of local public education?at the district level or the level of the neighborhood school? (2) After ...
Journal Article
Cleaning the air with the invisible hand
Journal Article
New indexes track the state of the states
Journal Article
Looking ahead: leading indexes for Pennsylvania and New Jersey
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. A natural complement would be a set of leading indexes. In this article, Ted Crone and Kevin Babyak introduce leading indexes for the two largest states in the District Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Working Paper
Consistent economic indexes for the 50 states.
In the late 1980s James Stock and Mark Watson developed for the U.S. economy an alternative coincident index to the one now published by the Conference Board. They used the Kalman filter to estimate a latent dynamic factor for the national economy and designated the common factor as the coincident index. This paper uses the Stock/Watson methodology to estimate a consistent set of coincident indexes for the 50 states. These indexes provide researchers with a comprehensive monthly measure of economic activity that can be used to examine a number of state and regional issues.
Working Paper
Measuring housing services inflation
Recent papers have questioned the accuracy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics? methodology for measuring implicit rents for owner-occupied housing. We propose cross-checking the BLS statistics by using data on owner-occupied and rental housing from the American Housing Survey.
Journal Article
Where have all the factory jobs gone - and why?
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 more slowly than the nation's. Why has the region's manufacturing sector lagged behind? In this article, Ted Crone looks at shifts in markets and differences in costs as possible culprits.