Source: Indiana University: Indiana Business Research Center  

Release: Brave-Butters-Kelley Indexes  

Units:  Standard Deviations, Seasonally Adjusted

Frequency:  Quarterly

The Brave-Butters-Kelley Indexes (BBKI) are the byproduct of research originally conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Currently, the BBKI are maintained and produced by the Indiana Business Research Center at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. The BBK Coincident and Leading Indexes and Monthly GDP Growth for the U.S. are constructed from a collapsed dynamic factor analysis of a panel of 490 monthly measures of real economic activity and quarterly real GDP growth.

The BBK Leading Index is the leading subcomponent of the cycle measured in standard deviation units from trend real GDP growth.

This quarterly series is aggregated from the monthly version of the series (BBKMLEIX), using the triangle average described in Brave, Butters, and Kelley (2019) to approximate quarterly annualized (log) percent changes from the monthly series.

For more details, see also:
Brave, Scott A., Ross Cole, and David Kelley, 2019, A 'big data' view of the U.S. economy: Introducing the Brave-Butters-Kelley Indexes, Chicago Fed Letter, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, No. 422. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.21033/cfl-2019-422
Brave, Scott A., R. Andrew Butters, and David Kelley, 2019, A new 'big data' index of U.S. economic activity, Economic Perspectives, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Vol. 43, No. 1. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.21033/ep-2019-1