Search Results
Journal Article
Who is that guy on the $10 bill?
Alexander Hamilton is the least known and most misunderstood of our nation's founders. His contributions include creating a monetary standard, establishing our banking system, and ensuring the young nation's creditworthiness. This Economic Commentary explains how much of our financial strength we owe to Hamilton.
Report
Rethinking the measurement of household inflation expectations: preliminary findings
This paper reports preliminary findings from a Federal Reserve Bank of New York research program aimed at improving survey measures of inflation expectations. We find that seemingly small differences in how inflation is referred to in a survey can lead respondents to consider significantly different price concepts. For near-term inflation, the "prices in general" question in the monthly Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers can elicit responses that focus on the most visible prices, such as gasoline or food. Questions on the "rate of inflation" can lead to responses on the ...
Working Paper
Monitoring core inflation
An analysis of the use of limited-information estimators as measures of core inflation, showing that these estimators, such as the median of the cross-sectional distribution of inflation, have a higher correlation with past money growth and deliver improved forecasts of future inflation relative to the Consumer Price Index.
Journal Article
Voluntary export restraints: the cost of building walls
An illustration of the cost and employment effects of Japanese voluntary export restraints on new-car imports to the U.S.
Journal Article
Midyear report of the Fourth District Economists' Roundtable
A summation of the May 20, 1994 meeting of the Fourth District Economists' Roundtable, at which participants offered their views on the current and prospective state of the economy and discussed the limitations of describing the U.S. business cycle.
Journal Article
Comparing inflation expectations of households and economists: is a little knowledge a dangerous thing?
A comparison of the performance of forecasts by economists (the Livingston survey), households (the Michigan Survey of Consumer Finances), and a time series model (ARIMA).
Journal Article
The seasonality of consumer prices
A reevaluation of the evidence of seasonality in prices, finding that seasonal price movements have become more prominent in the relatively stable inflation environment that has prevailed since 1982, and that the amount of seasonality differs greatly by item, making it difficult to generalize about seasonal price movements.
Working Paper
A different kind of money illusion: the case of long and variable lags
An analysis of how the money supply process can affect the cross-covariance structure of inflation and monetary growth, showing that the Federal Reserve's change in emphasis to monetary targeting in late 1979 could have made the apparently long lag from money growth to inflation virtually disappear in the 1980s.
Journal Article
On the origin and evolution of the word inflation
A historical look at the origin and uses of the word inflation, arguing that although the term has become nearly synonymous with "price increase," its original meaning--a rise in the general price level caused by an imbalance between the quantity of money and trade needs--is the definition driving many of those who advocate an anti-inflation policy for the Federal Reserve.
Journal Article
Are some prices in the CPI more forward looking than others? We think so
Some of the items that make up the Consumer Price Index change prices frequently, while others are slow to change. We explore whether these two sets of prices - sticky and flexible - provide insight on different aspects of the inflation process. We find that sticky prices appear to incorporate expectations about future inflation to a greater degree than prices that change on a frequent basis, while flexible prices respond more powerfully to economic conditions?economic slack. Importantly, our sticky-price measure seems to contain a component of inflation expectations, and that component may ...