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Content Type:Working Paper 

Working Paper
Forecasting U.S. Economic Activity with a Small Information Set

We provide a parsimonious setup for forecasting U.S. GDP growth and the unemployment rate based on a few fundamental drivers. This setup yields forecasts that are reasonably accurate compared with private-sector and Federal Reserve forecasts over the 1984–2019 and post COVID-19 pandemic periods. This result is achieved by jointly estimating the processes for GDP growth and the unemployment rate, with the constraint that GDP and unemployment follow Okun’s law in first differences. This setup can be easily extended to replace the variables in the information set with factors that might ...
Working Papers , Paper 25-4

Working Paper
Technological innovation in mortgage underwriting and the growth in credit, 1985–2015

The application of information technology to finance, or ?fintech,? is expected to revolutionize many aspects of borrowing and lending in the future, but technology has been reshaping consumer and mortgage lending for many years. During the 1990s, computerization allowed mortgage lenders to reduce loan-processing times and largely replace human-based assessments of credit risk with default predictions generated by sophisticated empirical models. Debt-to-income ratios at origination add little to the predictive power of these models, so the new automated underwriting systems allowed higher ...
Working Papers , Paper 19-11

Working Paper
Currency portfolios and nominal exchange rates in a dual currency search economy

The authors analyze a dual-currency search model in which agents may hold multiple units of both currencies. They study equilibria in which the two currencies are identical and equilibria in which the two currencies differ according to the magnitude of the "inflation tax" risk associated with each. When one currency has the right amount of risk, equilibria exist in which the safe currency trades for multiple units of the risky one (pure currency exchange). As a result, the steady state has a distribution of nominal exchange rates. The mean and variance of this distribution typically change ...
Working Papers (Old Series) , Paper 9916

Working Paper
A Theory of Intrinsic Inflation Persistence

We propose a novel theory of intrinsic inflation persistence by introducing trend inflation and variable elasticity of demand in a model with staggered price and wage setting. Under nonzero trend inflation, the variable elasticity generates intrinsic persistence in inflation through a measure of price dispersion stemming from staggered price setting. It also introduces intrinsic persistence in wage inflation under staggered wage setting, which affects price inflation. With the theory we show that inflation exhibits a persistent, hump-shaped response to a monetary policy shock. We also show ...
Working Papers , Paper 19-16

Working Paper
The Effect of Component Disaggregation on Measures of the Median and Trimmed-Mean CPI

For decades, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland (FRBC) has produced median and trimmed-mean consumer price index (CPI) measures. These have proven useful in various contexts, such as forecasting and understanding post-COVID inflation dynamics. Revisions to the FRBC methodology have historically involved increasing the level of disaggregation in the CPI components, which has improved accuracy. Thus, it may seem logical that further disaggregation would continue to enhance its accuracy. However, we theoretically demonstrate that this may not necessarily be the case. We then explore the ...
Working Papers , Paper 24-02

Working Paper
The Postpandemic U.S. Immigration Surge: New Facts and Inflationary Implications

The U.S. experienced an extraordinary postpandemic surge in unauthorized immigration. This paper combines administrative data on border encounters and immigration court records with household survey data to document two new facts about these immigrants: They tend to be hand-to-mouth consumers and low-skilled workers that complement the existing workforce. We build these features into a model with capital, household heterogeneity and population growth to study the inflationary effects of this episode. Contrary to the popular view, we find little effect on inflation, as the increase in supply ...
Working Papers , Paper 2407

Working Paper
Total Recall? Evaluating the Macroeconomic Knowledge of Large Language Models

We evaluate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to estimate historical macroeconomic variables and data release dates. We find that LLMs have precise knowledge of some recent statistics, but performance degrades as we go farther back in history. We highlight two particularly important kinds of recall errors: mixing together first print data with subsequent revisions (i.e., smoothing across vintages) and mixing data for past and future reference periods (i.e., smoothing within vintages). We also find that LLMs can often recall individual data release dates accurately, but aggregating ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2025-044

Working Paper
Documentation of the Estimated, Dynamic, Optimization-based (EDO) model of the U.S. economy: 2010 version

This paper provides documentation for a large-scale estimated DSGE model of the U.S. economy--the Federal Reserve Board's Estimated, Dynamic, Optimization-based (FRB/EDO) model project. The model can be used to address a wide range of practical policy questions on a routine basis. The paper discusses the model's specification, estimated parameters, and key properties.
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2010-29

Working Paper
Efficient computation of stochastic coefficients models

Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 132

Working Paper
Does distance matter in banking?

Deregulation and technological change have reduced the transactions costs that led to the dominance of local financial service suppliers, leading some to question if distance still matters in banking. This debate has been particularly acute in small business banking, where transactions costs are believed to be particularly high. This paper provides a detailed review of the literature on distance in banking markets, highlighting the reasons why geographic proximity is believed to be important and examining the changes that may have affected its importance. Relying on new data from the 2003 ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2008-34

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