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What Does Labor Market Tightness Tell Us About the End of an Expansion?
We use a model based on the historical relationships between unemployment, inflation, and recessions, along with the Summary of Economic Projections (SEP) from the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC),1 to examine the medium-term implications of current and projected unemployment rates for the U.S. economy. Our model predicts a low probability of a recession in the next two to three years based on SEP forecasts for additional labor market tightening over this horizon.
Searching for “Inflation Canaries” in Household Surveys
Current surveys of household inflation expectations make it challenging to identify “inflation canaries”—individuals who consistently send out early and accurate warning signals for inflation. We propose some simple changes in survey design (longer, staggered survey panels) and emphasis (focusing on changes in expectations rather than levels and highlighting particularly accurate subpopulations) that have the potential to alleviate these concerns. To demonstrate, we provide several examples using the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Survey of Consumer Expectations.
Working Paper
Predicting Benchmarked US State Employment Data in Real Time
US payroll employment data come from a survey of nonfarm business establishments and are therefore subject to revisions. While the revisions are generally small at the national level, they can be large enough at the state level to substantially alter assessments of current economic conditions. Researchers and policymakers must therefore exercise caution in interpreting state employment data until they are “benchmarked” against administrative data on the universe of workers some 5 to 16 months after the reference period. This paper develops and tests a state space model that predicts ...
A Closer Look at the Correlation Between Google Trends and Initial Unemployment Insurance Claims
Since the onset of the pandemic, there has been growing interest in tracking labor market activity with “big data” sources like Google Trends.1 Just as an example, one can track how the number of Google searches with the term unemployment office has changed over the past week for the Chicago metro area or explore how unemployment became one of the top searched issues across the U.S. during the early months of the pandemic here.
Working Paper
The perils of working with Big Data and a SMALL framework you can use to avoid them
The use of “Big Data” to explain fluctuations in the broader economy or guide the business decisions of a firm is now so commonplace that in some instances it has even begun to rival more traditional government statistics and business analytics. Big data sources can very often provide advantages when compared to these more traditional data sources, but with these advantages also comes the potential for pitfalls. We lay out a framework called SMALL that we have developed in order to help interested parties as they navigate the big data minefield. Based on a set of five questions, the SMALL ...
Working Paper
Tracking U.S. Consumers in Real Time with a New Weekly Index of Retail Trade
We create a new weekly index of retail trade that accurately predicts the U.S. Census Bureau's Monthly Retail Trade Survey (MRTS). The index's weekly frequency provides an early snapshot of the MRTS and allows for a more granular analysis of the aggregate consumer response to fast-moving events such as the Covid-19 pandemic. To construct the index, we extract the co-movement in weekly data series capturing credit and debit card transactions, mobility, gasoline sales, and consumer sentiment. To ensure that the index is representative of aggregate retail spending, we implement a novel ...
Newsletter
Measuring Detroit’s Economic Progress with the DEAI
This article explains what the Detroit Economic Activity Index (DEAI) tells us about Detroit’s economic progress as of late 2019. Although the rate of progress had slowed some since 2016, the city continued to make headway last year in its recovery from bankruptcy.In a previous Chicago Fed Letter,1 we introduced the DEAI to show that Detroit was doing better in late 2016 than in late 2014, when it exited bankruptcy. According to the DEAI, there were signs of increasing private investment, higher employment, lower unemployment, rising incomes, and improving real estate values in December ...
Working Paper
The Chicago Fed Labor Market Indicators: Bridging the Gap with Alternative Labor Data
We present the Chicago Fed Labor Market Indicators (LMI): a twice-monthly release that includes the job-finding rate, the job-separation rate, and a forecast for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) unemployment rate. To overcome limitations in data availability, the LMI uses partial least squares to combine CPS-based finding and separation rates with higher-frequency alternative and traditional labor market data series—such as unemployment insurance claims, Google Trends searches, online job postings, and survey-based indicators. Our resulting flow-consistent unemployment rate (FCR) ...
Working Paper
Charged and Almost Ready—What Is Holding Back the Resale Market for Battery Electric Vehicles?
We utilize vehicle registration microdata for all new and used vehicles registered in the U.S. for model years 2010-2022 to study the market for used battery electric vehicles (BEVs). From these records, we establish two stylized facts: 1) BEVs enter the used market at the slowest rate compared to any other powertrain technology, and 2) BEVs are driven significantly less than vehicles featuring other powertrain technologies. We connect these facts through a statistical model of used vehicle registration counts and find that there are significant behavioral differences between BEV and other ...
Newsletter
Looking down the road with ALEX: Forecasting U.S. GDP
In this article, we examine the recovery from the recession that began with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in the U.S. To do so, we present and discuss for the first time the results from a mixed-frequency Bayesian vector autoregressive model called ALEX. This model uses 107 monthly and quarterly indicators of economic activity to forecast the near-term path of U.S. real gross domestic product (GDP).