Search Results
Working Paper
Back to the Present: Learning about the Euro Area through a Now-casting Model
We build a model for simultaneously now-casting economic conditions in the euro area and its three largest member countries--Germany, France, and Italy. The model formalizes how market participants and policymakers monitor the euro area by incorporating all market moving indicators in real time. We find that area wide and country-specific data provide informative signals to now-cast the economic conditions in the euro area and member countries. The model provides accurate predictions of economic conditions in real time over a period that covers the past three recessions.
Working Paper
News and Uncertainty Shocks
We provide novel evidence that technological news and uncertainty shocks, identified one at a time using VAR models as in the literature, are correlated; that is, they are not truly structural. We then proceed by proposing an identification scheme to disentangle the effects of news and financial uncertainty shocks. We find that by removing uncertainty effects from news shocks, the positive responses of economic activity to news shocks are strengthened in the short term; and that the negative responses of activity to financial uncertainty shocks are deepened in the medium term as ?good ...
Discussion Paper
Is China Really Growing at 5 Percent?
Chinese authorities recently announced a growth target of "around 5 percent" for 2025, the same as their 2024 target. Five percent is about half the pace of growth that China sustained from the 1980s to the early 2010s, but it is nonetheless quite high for an economy flirting with deflation and mired in a years-long property bust.
Working Paper
Quantifying Deregulation and its Economic Effects: A Large Language Model Approach
We construct a news-based index of deregulation for the United States from 1960 through 2025 using AI to semantically classify newspaper articles. We distinguish articles discussing deregulation from those discussing increased regulation, assigning intensity scores that reflect both the centrality of deregulatory content and whether articles discuss advocacy, proposals, or enacted measures. Human validation confirms strong agreement between AI and human classifications. The deregulation index captures major reform episodes including transportation and telecommunications liberalization in the ...
Discussion Paper
Lessons from the Co-movement of Inflation around the World
The aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic saw a surge in inflation around the world, reflecting rapid increases in the demand for goods, strained supply chains, tight labor markets, and sharp hikes in commodity prices exacerbated by the Russian war on Ukraine. As illustrated in figure 1, this inflation surge was synchronized across advanced and emerging economies, not only for total inflation but also for its core component.
Discussion Paper
International Measures of Common Inflation
A key challenge for monetary policymakers in achieving their inflation goals—particularly important at the current juncture—is to be able to distinguish between persistent inflationary changes and short-term idiosyncratic shocks. The most common approach for filtering out short-term price shocks from inflation is to focus on measures of "core" inflation, traditionally defined as the change in the consumer price index (CPI) excluding food and energy prices.