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Report
High Frequency Data and a Weekly Economic Index during the Pandemic
This paper describes a weekly economic index (WEI) developed to track the rapid economic developments associated with the onset of and policy response to the novel coronavirus in the United States. The WEI, with its ten component series, tracks the overall economy. Comparing the contributions of the WEI’s components in the 2008 and 2020 recessions reveals differences in how the two events played out at a high frequency. During the 2020 collapse and recovery, it provides a benchmark to interpret similarities and differences of novel indicators with shorter samples and/or nonstationary ...
Report
Measuring Real Activity Using a Weekly Economic Index
This paper describes a weekly economic index (WEI) developed to track the rapid economic developments associated with the onset of and policy response to the novel coronavirus in the United States. The WEI is a weekly composite index of real economic activity, with eight of ten series available the Thursday after the end of the reference week. In addition to being a weekly real activity index, the WEI has strong predictive power for output measures and provided an accurate nowcast of current-quarter GDP growth in the first half of 2020. We document how the WEI responded to key events and data ...
Working Paper
Measuring Real Activity Using a Weekly Economic Index
This paper describes a weekly economic index (WEI) developed to track the rapid economic developments associated with the onset of and policy response to the novel coronavirus in the United States. The WEI is a weekly composite index of real economic activity, with eight of 10 series available the Thursday after the end of the reference week. In addition to being a weekly real activity index, the WEI has strong predictive power for output measures and provided an accurate nowcast of current-quarter GDP growth in the first half of 2020, with weaker performance in the second half. We document ...
Conference Paper
Phillips curve inflation forecasts
This paper surveys the literature since 1993 on pseudo out-of-sample evaluation of inflation forecasts in the United States and conducts an extensive empirical analysis that recapitulates and clarifies this literature using a consistent data set and methodology. The literature review and empirical results are gloomy and indicate that Phillips curve forecasts (broadly interpreted as forecasts using an activity variable) are better than other multivariate forecasts, but their performance is episodic, sometimes better than and sometimes worse than a good (not nave) univariate benchmark. The ...
Journal Article
Temporal instability of the unemployment-inflation relationship
Report
Economic Benefits of COVID-19 Screening Tests
We assess the economic value of screening testing programs as a policy response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We find that the fiscal, macroeconomic, and health benefits of rapid SARS-CoV-2 screening testing programs far exceed their costs, with the ratio of economic benefits to costs typically in the range of 2-15 (depending on program details), not counting the monetized value of lives saved. Unless the screening test is highly specific, however, the signal value of the screening test alone is low, leading to concerns about adherence. Confirmatory testing increases the net economic ...