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Report
Forecasting CPI Shelter under Falling Market-Rent Growth
Shelter (housing) costs constitute a large component of price indexes, including 42 percent of the widely followed core Consumer Price Index (CPI). The shelter prices measured in the CPI capture new and existing renters and tend to lag market rents. This lag explains how in recent months the shelter-price index (CPI shelter) has accelerated while market rents have pulled back. We construct an error correction model using data at the metropolitan statistical area level to forecast how CPI shelter will evolve. We forecast that CPI shelter will grow 5.88 percent from September 2022 to September ...
Working Paper
Consumption Heterogeneity by Occupation: Understanding the Impact of Occupation on Personal Consumption during the COVID-19 Pandemic
This paper exploits the variation in the unemployment rate of different occupations in the first part of the COVID-19 pandemic to analyze the response of consumption spending to unemployment risk. We find that earlier in the pandemic, higher unemployment risk did not reduce relative spending. However, as the pandemic proceeded, higher unemployment risk reduced relative spending. This pattern held across both essential and nonessential spending categories. We find that “high-risk” occupations had three common characteristics: lower ability to be performed from home, higher physical ...
Report
Consumption Spending during the COVID-19 Pandemic
We use a novel empirical approach to decompose the impact of different economic, demographic, and COVID-19–related factors (such as lockdowns, case counts, and vaccination rates) on consumption spending on a week-by-week basis during the pandemic. This allows us to study how demographic and economic groups were differentially affected by the pandemic while crucially controlling for other factors. Our results imply that Hispanic and college-educated populations showed particularly large and persistent declines in relative spending. We also compute the relative importance of factors in ...
Working Paper
The Price-Change Statistics We’ve Weighted For
The real effects of monetary policy depend on price stickiness. Existing studies that measure aggregate stickiness using US consumer price index microdata hold the consumption basket fixed. This yields a lower level of stickiness in 2024 compared with 1978. We show instead that stickiness is unchanged. Although individual products now change prices more frequently, the effect is largely offset by shifts in consumer spending, notably toward services with stickier prices. These consumption-basket shifts reduce the estimated decline in monetary non neutrality by 25 percentage points, suggesting ...
Report
Transitory or Persistent? What the Frequency of Price Changes May Tell Us about Inflation
This brief shows how distinguishing between the dynamics of frequently and infrequently adjusted prices can provide insight into the nature of inflation—whether inflation pressures are new and transitory or sustained and spreading. It breaks down the non-rent portion of the Consumer Price Index into two subindexes, one for products that change prices frequently (the flexible sector) and one for products that change prices infrequently (the sticky sector).
Report
The Distribution of Sectoral Price Changes and Recent Inflation Developments
Inflation has declined across many sectors so far in 2023, but the distribution of sectoral price changes still shows atypical features, such as bimodality in which substantial masses of sectors record price changes both below and above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent inflation target. Such bimodality was not typical before the pandemic, suggesting that sector-specific price adjustments are now playing a more important role in inflation developments. The recent slowdown in inflation was partly caused by a larger-than-normal share of the consumption basket being located in the left tail of ...
Working Paper
Looking Beyond the Fed: Do Central Banks Cause Information Effects?
The importance of central bank information effects is the subject of an ongoing debate. Most work in this area focuses on the limited number of monetary policy events at the Federal Reserve. I assess the degree to which nine other central banks cause information effects. This analysis yields a much larger panel of primarily novel events. Following a surprise monetary tightening, economic forecasts improve in line with information effects. However, I find this outcome is driven by the predictability of monetary policy surprises and not information effects. My results support the view that ...
Working Paper
The Role of Industrial Composition in Driving the Frequency of Price Change
We analyze the impact of shifts in the industrial composition of the economy on the distribution of the frequency of price change and its consequences for the slope of the Phillips curve for the United States. By combining product-level microdata on the frequency of price change with data on industry shares from 1947 through 2019, we document that shifts in industrial composition led to a gradual reduction in the median monthly frequency of price change from 9.2 percent in 1947 to 6.9 percent in 2019. Other percentiles of the distribution of the frequency of price change show similar ...
Report
Debt, Deficits, and Interest Rates
This paper identifies how a rise in the deficit/debt impacts interest rates by looking at the high-frequency response of interest rates to fiscal surprises. The fiscal surprises are the unexpected components of deficit releases and the changes in official forecasts by the Congressional Budget Office and by the Office of Management and Budget. The paper estimates that a rise in the deficit-to-GDP ratio of 1 percentage point raises the 10-year nominal rate by 8.1 basis points. This is quantitatively similar for other Treasury maturities and for corporate debt interest rates. The paper also ...
Working Paper
The Pass‐Through of Gaps between Market Rent and the Price of Shelter
The gap between market rent and the price of shelter was 6.6 percent larger in December 2023 relative to December 2019. Because shelter prices comprise 36 percent of the Consumer Price Index and therefore influence monetary policy decisions, it is vital to understand the pass‐through of this difference, or “market‐shelter gap.” I use MSA‐level variation to answer this question. When there is a positive market–shelter gap, the price of shelter grows faster and market rent grows slower until the gap closes, which takes about five years. Faster shelter‐price growth and slower ...