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Journal Article
Productivity in the Twelfth District
Journal Article
News Sentiment in the Time of COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic is causing severe disruptions to daily life and economic activity. Reliable assessments of the economic fallout in this rapidly evolving situation require timely data. Existing sentiment indexes are useful indicators of current and future spending but are only available with a lag or have a short history. A new Daily News Sentiment Index provides a way to measure sentiment in real time from 1980 to today. Compared with survey-based measures of consumer sentiment, this index shows an earlier and more pronounced drop in sentiment in recent weeks.
Journal Article
Highway grants: roads to prosperity?
Federal highway grants to states appear to boost economic activity in the short and medium term. The short-term effects appear to be due largely to increases in aggregate demand. Medium-term effects apparently reflect the increased productive capacity brought by improved roads. Overall, each dollar of federal highway grants received by a state raises that state?s annual economic output by at least two dollars, a relatively large multiplier.
Journal Article
Recent and Near-Term Fiscal Policy: Headwind or Tailwind?
The federal government routinely uses government spending and taxes to help offset the highs and lows of the U.S. business cycle. While government spending typically increases during a recession, the magnitude of the fiscal expansion during the pandemic recession was outsized compared with the average historical pattern. This likely contributed to real economic growth and possibly inflation during the recovery. Over the next few years, U.S. fiscal policy is expected to be roughly neutral, providing neither a tailwind nor headwind to the overall economy.
Working Paper
The Local Economic Impact of Natural Disasters
We use county panel data to study the dynamic responses of local economies after naturaldisasters in the U.S. Specifically, we estimate disaster impulse response functions for personalincome per capita and a broad range of other economic outcomes, using a panel version of thelocal projections estimator. In contrast to some recent cross-country studies, we find thatdisasters increase total and per capita personal income over the longer-run (as of 8 years out).The effect is driven initially largely by a temporary employment boost and in the longer run byan increase in average weekly wages. We ...
Journal Article
Productivity growth: causes and consequences - conference summary
This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at the conference "Productivity Growth: Causes and Consequences" held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on November 18-19, 2005, under the sponsorship of the Bank's Center for the Study of Innovation and Productivity.
Working Paper
Taxing Billionaires: Estate Taxes and the Geographical Location of the Ultra-Wealthy
We study the effect of state-level estate taxes on the geographical location of the Forbes 400 richest Americans and its implications for tax policy. We use a change in federal tax law to identify the tax sensitivity of the ultra-wealthy?s locational choices. Before 2001, some states had an estate tax and others didn?t, but the tax liability for the ultra-wealthy was independent of their domicile state due to a federal credit. In 2001, the credit was phased out and the estate tax liability for the ultra-wealthy suddenly became highly dependent on domicile state. We find the number of Forbes ...
Journal Article
Is the recent productivity boom over?
Productivity growth has been quite strong over the past 2 years, despite a drop in the second quarter of 2010. Many analysts believe that productivity growth must slow sharply in order for the labor market to recover robustly. However, looking at the observable factors underlying recent productivity growth and the patterns of productivity over past recessions and recoveries, a sharp slowdown appears unlikely. ; This Economic Letter examines the risks to this forecast, first looking at how productivity growth has fared in past recessions and recoveries. Then it considers where recent gains ...
Working Paper
Importing technology
We look at disaggregated imports of various types of equipment to make inferences on cross-country differences in the composition of equipment investment. We make three contributions. First, we document large differences in investment composition. Second, we explain these differences as being based on each equipment type's intrinsic efficiency, as well as on its degree of complementarity with other factors whose abundance differ across countries. Third, we examine the implications of investment composition for development accounting, i.e., for explaining the cross-country variation in income ...
Journal Article
Relative comparisons and economics: empirical evidence
This Letter reviews the empirical evidence on the extent to which individuals' sense of well-being or happiness is related to metrics of the well-being of others.