Forecasting the New York State economy: The coincident and leading indicators approach

Currently there are no reliable summary indicators of the economic and fiscal condition of states and localities. This deficiency has hampered the efforts of policy makers at the sub-national level to monitor changes in the economic environment and predict how those changes will impact the fiscal health of governments. This paper attempts to fill this analytical vacuum by providing summary indicators of economic and fiscal health for New York State. The models developed are based on the single-index methodology developed by Stock and Watson. This approach allows us to date New York business cycles and compare local cyclical behavior with the nation as a whole. We develop a leading index of economic indicators which predicts future movements in the coincident indicator. The Stock and Watson approach is used to create a fiscal indicator which acts as a summary indicator of revenue performance for New York. In addition, we explore the ability of our economic indicator series to predict future changes in state revenues. We find that changes in the leading indicator series have significant predictive power in forecasting changes in our revenue index.