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Journal Article
Getting a Jump on Inflation
Accurate official estimates of Fed policymakers? preferred PCE inflation measure take months, and sometimes years, to become available. A small set of timelier indicators offers realtime power to ?nowcast? PCE inflation. Those indicators provide as much accuracy as initial government estimates and remain informative even after official estimates have been published.
Journal Article
Is the Fed slave to a defunct economist
Journal Article
The dynamic impact of fundamental tax reform part 1: the basic model
The Internal Revenue Service remains unpopular, the U.S. savings rate remains low, and pressure to efficiently raise significant new tax revenues seems certain to grow once the baby boom generation reaches retirement age. Consequently, it is likely that alternatives to the current income tax system will receive substantial political and media attention in coming years. In this first of two articles on the economic impact of fundamental tax reform, Evan Koenig and Gregory Huffman describe a framework for analyzing how the adoption of a flat-rate consumption tax would affect the economy over ...
Working Paper
Real-time GDP Growth Forecasts
The authors forecast current-quarter real GDP growth using monthly data that would have been available to an analyst in real time. They demonstrate that using real-time data is of major importance both when estimating GDP forecasting models and when evaluating their performance. Moreover, the authors show that the out-of-sample forecasting performance of their model is comparable or superior to that of the Blue-Chip consensus forecast provided that more than one month of current-quarter data are available
Journal Article
The dynamic impact of fundamental tax reform part 2 : extensions
In this second of two articles on the economic impact of fundamental tax reform, Gregory Huffman and Evan Koenig extend their earlier framework for analyzing how the adoption of a flat-rate consumption tax would affect the economy over time. They argue that if tax reform is to be successful in stimulating investment and raising long-run living standards, then it is important that ways be found to avoid increasing the rate of labor-income taxation. Increases in labor-income tax rates can undo the positive economic effects of a cut in the rate of capital-income taxation. Conversely, cuts in ...
Journal Article
Real-time historical dataset enhances accuracy of economic analyses
A growing body of empirical macroeconomic literature suggests that analyses using real-time data often yield substantially different?and more accurate?conclusions.
Journal Article
Growth in the U.S. economy depends on stronger consumer spending