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Journal Article
Always look for the disclaimer
Journal Article
After rocky 2008, U.S. consumers seek stable ground in 2009
An economy besieged on a number of fronts in 2008 staggers into 2009 with rising unemployment, falling house prices, and strained financial markets. A recessionary environment poses formidable challenges for U.S. consumers in the coming year.
Unpaid Absence from Work Because of COVID-19
As has been widely reported, the March employment report shed light on the early impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the U.S. labor market. One telling number is the official unemployment rate, which tallies the share of the labor force made up of people out of work (but who are looking for a job) plus those who have been laid off and expect to be recalled. The official unemployment rate increased from 3.5 percent in February to 4.4 percent in March. My own preferred measure is the share of the working-age population who are unemployed, working part-time because of economic conditions, or ...
Journal Article
Putting U.S. manufacturing in perspective
Journal Article
Using federal funds futures rates to predict Federal Reserve actions
The federal funds futures rate naturally embodies the market's expectation of the average behavior of the federal funds rate. But, as John C. Robertson and Daniel L. Thornton explain, analysts cannot attempt to identify Fed policy from the behavior of the federal funds futures rate without making somewhat arbitrary additional assumptions. The authors investigate the predictive accuracy of a rule based on the federal funds futures rate from October 1988 through August 1997 using an assumption that is sufficient for partially identifying when the market is expecting a Fed action but not for ...
Working Paper
Earnings on the information technology roller coaster: insight from matched employer-employee data
This paper uses matched employer-employee data for the state of Georgia to examine workers? earnings experience through the information technology (IT) sector?s employment boom of the mid-1990s and its bust in the early 2000s. The results show that even after controlling for individual characteristics before the sector?s boom, transitioning out of the IT sector to a non-IT industry generally resulted in a large wage penalty. However, IT service workers who transitioned to a non-IT industry still fared better than those who took a non-IT employment path. For IT manufacturing workers, there is ...
Working Paper
Prior parameter uncertainty: Some implications for forecasting and policy analysis with VAR models
Models used for policy analysis should generate reliable unconditional forecasts as well as policy simulations (conditional forecasts) that are based on a structural model of the economy. Vector autoregression (VAR) models have been criticized for having inaccurate forecasts as well as being difficult to interpret in the context of an underlying economic model. In this paper, we examine how the treatment of prior uncertainty about parameter values can affect forecasting accuracy and the interpretation of identified structural VAR models. ; Typically, VAR models are specified with long lag ...
Working Paper
Improving forecasts of the federal funds rate in a policy model
Vector autoregression (VAR) models are widely used for policy analysis. Some authors caution, however, that the forecast errors of the federal funds rate from such a VAR are large compared to those from the federal funds futures market. From these findings, it is argued that the inaccurate federal funds rate forecasts from VARs limit their usefulness as a tool for guiding policy decisions. In this paper, we demonstrate that the poor forecast performance is largely eliminated if a Bayesian estimation technique is used instead of OLS. In particular, using two different data sets we show that ...
Working Paper
Forecasting using relative entropy
The paper describes a relative entropy procedure for imposing moment restrictions on simulated forecast distributions from a variety of models. Starting from an empirical forecast distribution for some variables of interest, the technique generates a new empirical distribution that satisfies a set of moment restrictions. The new distribution is chosen to be as close as possible to the original in the sense of minimizing the associated Kullback-Leibler Information Criterion, or relative entropy. The authors illustrate the technique by using several examples that show how restrictions from ...