U-Haul Mobility Economic Index

Designed by Kelly Emrick, DHSc, PhD, MBA

https://www.uhaul.com/About/Migration

Use this dashboard as a scenario-and-nowcasting workbench that turns a mobility proxy into a forward-looking growth signal, then tests how that signal holds up under macro constraints. Start by selecting a mode. In State proxy, enter a U-Haul rank (ideally the annual rank or a five-year average) and, if needed, apply a mobility shock to represent exogenous disturbances to moving behavior such as fuel-cost spikes, natural disasters, or policy changes. In Metro proxy, supply a mobility percentile directly when you have metro-level relative information. In the Custom series, paste a normalized mobility series so the model can use both the latest level and short-term momentum. Next, set Calibration strength to control how heavily the mobility proxy drives results relative to fundamentals, then adjust the fundamentals sliders (real rates, housing affordability stress, labor strength, business formation, logistics pressure, and external demand) to reflect your baseline macro view or a specific hypothesis. When you click Run forecast, the outputs tell a coherent story across four linked metrics: the Mobility signal captures the relative “attractor” strength of the geography (higher values imply stronger net inflow pressure), the Growth nowcast (annualized) translates that attractor signal plus fundamentals into an expansion or contraction estimate, the Recession probability (next 4Q) summarizes downside risk when rates, housing stress, and cost pressure dominate demand resilience, and the Market index trajectory shows the cumulative implication over the selected horizon with an uncertainty band to remind you that the inputs are proxies rather than structural causal parameters. If you enable Panel nowcasting (50-state), you can run the same logic across all states, apply weights (equal or population-share template), and read the national composite growth and national recession probability as a weighted aggregation of state conditions; the top positive and negative contributors then reveal which states are pulling the composite up or down based on their weighted deviation from the national growth baseline. In practice, the dashboard data tells you whether the market outlook is being driven primarily by mobility pull (people and demand moving in), by macro constraints (rates and housing stress choking that pull), or by risk asymmetry (a decent growth nowcast paired with a rising recession probability), which is precisely the kind of “what must be true for this forecast to hold” insight economists need for disciplined scenario work and reproducible reporting via the JSON/CSV exports and scenario links.