A brief history of the Indiana Business Review
Dateline: March 10, 1926.
On this day in history, Volume 1, Number 1 of the Indiana Business Review (IBR) was launched by the newly established Bureau of Business Research, now known as the Indiana Business Research Center (IBRC). The flagship publication has been in continuous production for 100 years, as proven by this issue, Number 1 of Volume 101.
The Bureau of Business Research, established in late fall 1925 as part of the relatively new School of Commerce and Finance at Indiana University (1920), launched the Indiana Business Review to inform the state’s business and government leaders about Indiana economic conditions and trends. Today, the IBR provides accessible, nonpartisan and data-driven insights into economic, workforce and demographic issues affecting Indiana and beyond.
The publication’s longevity is a testament to Indiana’s economy and its people. With its rich legacy, it serves as both a historical record for the state and a contemporary resource for data analysis and discussion. In celebration of the IBR’s centennial, we are pleased to share a brief glimpse of Indiana’s history through selected issues from its archives.
We begin this article with past reflections from former IBRC director Dr. Jerry Conover, who wrote about the IBR's 90th anniversary in another one of our publications, InContext (a collaboration with the Indiana Department of Workforce Development that began in 1999).1 Please enjoy Jerry's thoughts on the early issues of the IBR.
The Roaring Twenties
The IBRC and the Indiana Business Review were born at a time of great economic vitality. The opening paragraph from the first IBR issue states,
“Total business in Indiana during the first two months of 1926 has been larger than during the like period of any year in the history of the State. This period of prosperity began last autumn and for 6 months business has ranged from 7 to 20 per cent above corresponding months of the year previous.”
The mid-1920s were times of economic enthusiasm, when the first IBR issue chronicled impressive gains (that often set records) in Indiana banking activity, industrial production, electricity generation, building-stone production and employment. Construction was strong, too, with half of all new construction dedicated to building homes to accommodate Indiana’s growing population. Other indicators showing robust performance at the time included retail sales, freight car loadings and bank deposits.
The inaugural issue also summarized local conditions in the state’s key cities. In Indianapolis, for example, auto production and manufacturing generally were upbeat and building permits were up 24% year-over-year. Blast furnaces in Gary were running at close to 100% of capacity. Building was up in South Bend, and auto production was 40% ahead of the previous year. Most Terre Haute factories were running full-time, though more than a third of the region’s coal miners were out of work due to “labor union trouble,” mild weather and price competition.
Thus, despite occasional bumps here and there, much of the Indiana economy showed substantial upward momentum in 1926. This reflects the national economic picture of growing cities, significant industrial expansion, and broader participation by the public in financial markets as investors borrowed at low rates to buy stocks, hoping to cash in on rising share values. In the spirit of the times, economist Irving Fisher proclaimed that “stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
From boom to bust
Of course, what goes up must come down, as the U.S. and global economies did in the late-1920s. The stock market crash of October 1929 hammered the point home, leading to the collapse not only of the fortunes of major investors, but also of ordinary Americans and Hoosiers. Unemployment shot up and remained high for many years as the Great Depression slogged along.
It was just a year earlier that the IBR introduced a new multi-factor index of economic activity to track the Hoosier economy. The Indiana General Business (IGB) Curve graphed a weighted average of nine metrics tracked by the Bureau: automobile, coal, stone, electric power and pig iron production; building construction; bank debits; and hog and cattle receipts. These were all seasonally adjusted and weighted according to their importance to the Indiana economy, and then integrated into a composite index.
As shown in Figure 1, the IGB Curve depicts the percentage by which a given month’s activity was above or below the typical value for that month. A zero (“N”) value means business activity was normal, while positive values indicate activity above the normal level and conversely for negative values.
Figure 1: Indiana economic conditions, 1920 to 1930
Source: Indiana Business Review, Vol. 5, No. 11, November 20, 1930
From late 1925 through most of 1929, Indiana economic conditions hovered within about ±5% of the normal range, with above-average results more common than below-average. But the last quarter of 1929 began a precipitous plunge to more than 20% below normal in late 1930. The December 1930 IBR reported that retail customers were making as many purchases as a year earlier, but in smaller quantities. “Freight car loadings at Indianapolis during November were far under any month in recent years,” as were new car registrations and used car sales. Gasoline sales, however, were up year over year.
Not surprisingly, automobile manufacturers were operating on reduced schedules. Limestone shipments for building reached their lowest point in years, and steel mills were running at 45% of capacity. Building permits were down 55% from a year earlier, and 61% from 1928.
Given such weak conditions, it’s not surprising that fewer workers were quitting their jobs (generally less than 1% across sectors), though November 1930 layoffs rose greatly in certain industries — reaching 17% in metals-and-metal-products and 32% in vehicles — while remaining in the low single-digit percentages in most others.
Fast forward: The Great Recession (2009) and COVID-19 (2020)
Historical snapshots from these early-era IBRs allow for comparison between the harsh economic conditions of the early Great Depression years and the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Indiana felt the Great Depression’s blow across many industries, whereas the Great Recession hit the state’s manufacturing and construction sectors substantially harder than other industries (see Figure 2).2
Figure 2: Relative change in Indiana employment, December 2007 to September 2010
Source: Indiana Business Review, Vol. 85, No. 4
Indiana’s protracted recovery from the Great Recession was also captured in the IBR, particularly in winter Outlook issues of the publication. The annual Outlook issue is a collection of articles detailing experts’ economic forecasts for the upcoming year for Indiana, its metros, the nation and the globe, as well as the financial and housing markets. Notably, during the peak of the Great Recession, the IBR transitioned to a digital-only format as a cost-saving measure in 2010.
In the Outlook issue for 2015, author Tim Slaper wrote, “On the employment front, the good news is that, in 2015, the state is set to return to the same level of peak employment from last decade." Figure 3 (from the same Outlook article) shows the state’s annual employment growth from 2002 to 2013, as well as forecasted growth from 2014 to 2017.3
Figure 3: Indiana employment growth
Source: Indiana Business Review, Vol. 89, No. 4
The Outlook issues of the IBR can also be used as snapshots of the COVID-19 pandemic years. In the 2021 Outlook issue, authors Kyle Anderson and Ryan Brewer wrote the following about the Great Recession and the pandemic: “While the Great Recession unraveled slowly and painfully — like a severe drought — causing predictable accumulating damage over a period of several months, the COVID-19 pandemic struck like a tornado — without warning and with significant power."4
Subsequent issues of the IBR focused on pandemic-induced job losses, as detailed by author Ping (Claire) Zheng in Spring 2022 (see Figure 4),5 and the economic toll the pandemic took on the people and businesses of Indiana. The IBR continued to pursue other timely topics as well, including Indiana's growing or slowing economy, migration trends, population growth and decline, child care costs, workforce skills gaps, innovation and entrepreneurship.
Figure 4: Indiana’s year-over-year employment growth by major sector
Source: Indiana Business Review, Vol. 97, No. 1
A journey through time with the IBR
The IBR's content, graphics and imagery has evolved over its century of publication. It has transformed from a monthly periodical with a strong emphasis on Indiana’s industrial economy and business conditions to a more topically diversified, quarterly publication with expanded coverage of population, education, housing and labor market trends and analysis. We have improved our visual storytelling through graphs, charts and interactive visualizations that help us translate complex data into something both understandable and usable for readers throughout Indiana and, thanks to the internet, all over the world. We like to think that we help you, our reader, put data to work.
To close, we invite you to look through a selected set of IBR covers that take us on a fascinating journey through time, reflecting on eras defined by economic downturns, environmental concerns, legalizing gambling, shifting demographics and much more.
If you'd like to do a deeper dive into the Indiana Business Review and its history, archives of the publication are online beginning in 1988.
Notes
- Conover, Jerry, Ph.D., “The rearview mirror: A 90-Year retrospective on Indiana's economy,” InContext, May-June 2015, vol. 16, no. 3, https://www.incontext.indiana.edu/2015/may-jun/article2.asp.
- Conover, Jerry, Ph.D., “Indiana’s outlook for 2011,” Indiana Business Review, Outlook 2011 (Winter 2010), vol. 85, no. 4, https://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/ibr/2010/outlook/indiana.html.
- Slaper, Timothy F., Ph.D., “Indiana's outlook for 2015,” Indiana Business Review, Outlook 2015 (Winter 2014), vol. 89, no. 4, https://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/ibr/2014/outlook/indiana.html.
- Anderson, Kyle J., Ph.D. and Ryan Brewer, Ph.D., M.B.A., “Emerging from the depths of 2020: Indiana’s outlook for 2021,” Indiana Business Review, Winter 2020, vol. 95, no. 4, https://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/ibr/2020/outlook/indiana.html.
- Zheng, Ping (Claire) and Carol O. Rogers, “Indiana industry: On the rebound or permanent shifts?,” Indiana Business Review, Spring 2022, vol. 97, no. 1, https://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/ibr/2022/spring/article1.html.
