Research

The advance report on third quarter economic growth (released October 29) was not really bad news. After all, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was up by 2.0 percent, not on the decline as it would be in a double-dip recession.

Commercial real estate matters because it's a proxy for a city's economic health. When an economy grows, companies expand into new offices, warehouses and storefronts. Vacancy rates fall, property prices rise, and developers launch new projects.

Personal Income decreased in practically every state in the nation in 2009. For most states, such outright declines in personal income had not been seen since state income records began. Personal income fell nationally as well, for the first time in six decades.

If you use a cell phone or buy household electronics, there's a good chance you own a device with one or more components distributed by Avnet.

Before a bank offers you a mortgage re-fi, or a credit card company dangles a low interest rate before your eyes, some information-systems worker has probably pegged you as a promising prospect. He most likely used predictive modeling to do it, and it wasn't a quick, easy task.

Home prices in Phoenix have been on a welcome upswing for several months, but preliminary data for July shows no change from last July, according the W. P. Carey School's Karl Guntermann, who calculates the ASU-Repeat Sales Index (ASU-RSI).

On August 16 the Japanese Cabinet Office announced that Japan's second-quarter GDP was for the first time smaller than China's. A media frenzy ensued, and analysis firms raced to predict when China would surpass the U.S.

The recession has caused all sorts of difficulties for CFOs: falling earnings, tumbling stock prices and, occasionally, knotty negotiations with lenders. For most of them, it has also brought tougher targets for earning their bonuses.

As the saying goes, "If you ask 20 economists about the economic outlook, you'll get 21 scenarios for what lies ahead." The point is that economists famously disagree.

Although we have not yet seen sustained employment growth at the national level, labor markets in more and more states are showing improvement over the same period last year.