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Newsletter
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.
Newsletter
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.
Newsletter
A different way to review the Chicago Fed National Activity Index
This article analyzes the recent sources of strength and weakness in the Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI), using a new measure that is often a leading indicator of the index?s movements.
Journal Article
Nowcasting Using the Chicago Fed National Activity Index
The authors present an alternative version of the Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI), which is constructed using a methodology that allows for a more robust treatment of the underlying data series than its traditional methodology. This alternative CFNAI produces superior predictions of real gross domestic product growth for the current quarter (nowcasts) while correlating more closely with U.S. recessions than the traditional index.
Journal Article
A New “Big Data” Index of U.S. Economic Activity
The authors present a new ?big data? index of U.S. economic activity that can be used to track business and inflation cycles in real time and estimate monthly real gross domestic product growth.
Newsletter
A snapshot of the Midwest economy: past and present
For over ten years, the Chicago Fed has published an index of national economic activity, the Chicago Fed National Activity Index. Here, the authors build on the methodology underlying this index to construct a Midwest counterpart that captures variation in economic activity in the five states that make up the Seventh Federal Reserve District.