Search Results
Working Paper
PCE inflation and core inflation
This paper investigates the forecasting accuracy of the trimmed mean inflation rate of the Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) deflator. Earlier works have examined the forecasting ability of limited-influence estimators (trimmed means and the weighted median) of the Consumer Price Index but none have compared the weighted median and trimmed mean of the PCE. Also addressed is the systematic bias that appears due to the differences in the means of inflation measures over the sample. This paper supports earlier results that limited-influence estimators provide better forecasts of future ...
Journal Article
This little piggy restricted market access
Report
Great expectations and the end of the depression
This paper argues that the U.S. economy's recovery from the Great Depression was driven by a shift in expectations brought about by the policy actions of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On the monetary policy side, Roosevelt abolished the gold standard and-even more important-announced the policy objective of inflating the price level to pre-depression levels. On the fiscal policy side, Roosevelt expanded real and deficit spending. Together, these actions made his policy objective credible; they violated prevailing policy dogmas and introduced a policy regime change such as that ...
Working Paper
Real implications of the zero bound on nominal interest rates
If monetary policy succeeds in keeping average inflation very low, nominal interest rates may occasionally be constrained by the zero lower bound. The degree to which this constraint has real implications depends on the monetary policy feedback rule and the structure of price-setting. Policy rules that make the price level stationary lead to small real distortions from the zero bound. If policy imparts persistence into the inflation rate, the real implications of the zero bound are large in the presence of backward looking price-setting, and small if prices are set to maximize profits.
Journal Article
Local price variation and labor supply behavior
In standard economic theory, labor supply decisions depend on the complete set of prices: wages and the prices of relevant consumption goods. Nonetheless, most theoretical and empirical work in labor supply studies ignore prices other than wages. We address the question of whether the common practice of ignoring local price variation in labor supply studies is as innocuous as generally assumed. We describe a simple model to demonstrate that the effects of wage and nonlabor income on labor supply typically differ by location. In particular, we show that the derivative of the labor supply with ...
Journal Article
Formalizing the success of past policy
Discussion Paper
Inflation, slack, and Fed credibility
It is generally agreed that slack has some impact on inflation. There is much less agreement on what form the relationship takes and whether it is stable enough to reliably help predict inflation. This analysis focuses on the Great Moderation period. We find that slack (as measured by the unemployment rate) and changes in slack are negatively correlated with changes in inflation and also deviations of inflation from long-forward inflation expectations.> ; These relationships could have been exploited to produce forecasts of trimmed mean PCE inflation more accurate than rule-of-thumb ...
Working Paper
Measuring oil-price shocks using market-based information
We study the effects of oil-price shocks on the U.S economy combining narrative and quantitative approaches. After examining daily oil-related events since 1984, we classify them into various event types. We then develop measures of exogenous shocks that avoid endogeneity and predictability concerns. Estimation results indicate that oil-price shocks have had substantial and statistically significant effects during the last 25 years. In contrast, traditional VAR approaches imply much weaker and insignificant effects for the same period. This discrepancy stems from the inability of VARs to ...