Search Results
Journal Article
Will Tariffs Touch Off an Inflationary Impulse? Business Execs Think So.
Following the inflationary surge from 2021 to 2023, which was touched off by supply chain constraints and shipping bottlenecks, we evaluate a new panel of own-firm price and unit cost growth expectations in the Atlanta Fed's Survey of Business Uncertainty for signs that the anticipated impact from tariffs is broadening beyond directly affected firms. We find evidence for the potential of tariffs to touch off another bout of high inflation. First, firms that are directly exposed to tariffs have increased their year-ahead price growth expectations sharply (by 0.7 percentage points). Second, ...
Journal Article
How Credible Is Hong Kong's Currency Peg? Insights from Financial Market Prices
This article presents a structural asset-pricing model that quantifies financial market perceptions of the credibility of Hong Kong's Linked Exchange Rate System (LERS). Using data from the foreign exchange market, the authors estimate the probability that the Hong Kong dollar (HKD) remains pegged to the US dollar (USD) and the value the HKD would take if the peg were to break. The analysis reveals multiple episodes when market confidence in the peg declined, with particularly sharp stress in late 2022 and mid-2025. In these periods, capital flows, interest rate differentials, and liquidity ...
Journal Article
In Optimism We Trust? Explaining the Disconnect between Post-Election Optimism and Own-Firm Expectations
We randomly split the CFO survey panel into two separate surveys around the 2024 US elections to discern whether the results of the elections had any impact on financial decision makers' expectations. Respondents to the post-election survey reported sharply higher optimism about the US economy and an improved macroeconomic outlook relative to the pre-election responses. In contrast, own-firm optimism and revenue growth expectations were not meaningfully changed between the two surveys. Among many possible reasons for this disconnect, we highlight the expected impact of the new ...
Report
Estimating Population Means in the 2012 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice
This report examines the effect of adding to a longitudinal panel on estimates of population parameters in the 2012 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC) more than 1,000 newly recruited respondents specifically targeted to fill segments of the U.S. population that tend to be underbanked and underrepresented in the longitudinal panel. In many ways, the new respondents have fundamentally different characteristics from the ongoing respondents. To minimize confounding sources of change to annual estimates when making comparisons across years, the official 2012 SCPC publication was based on the ...
Working Paper
Sample Bias Related to Household Role
This paper develops a two-stage statistical analysis to identify and assess the effect of a sample bias associated with an individual's household role. Survey responses to questions about the respondent's role in household finances and a sampling design in which some households have all members take the survey enable the estimation of distributions for each individual's share of household responsibility. The methodology is applied to the 2017 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice. The distribution of responsibility shares among survey respondents suggests that the sampling procedure favors ...
Working Paper
Improved Estimation of Poisson Rate Distributions through a Multi-Mode Survey Design
Researchers interested in studying the frequency of events or behaviors among a population must rely on count data provided by sampled individuals. Often, this involves a decision between live event counting, such as a behavioral diary, and recalled aggregate counts. Diaries are generally more accurate, but their greater cost and respondent burden generally yield less data. The choice of survey mode, therefore, involves a potential tradeoff between bias and variance of estimators. I use a case study comparing inferences about payment instrument use based on different survey designs to ...
Report
Effects of Tariff Uncertainty on the Outlook of Small and Medium-sized Businesses
A large body of research demonstrates that uncertainty affects many dimensions of firms’ decisions, from investment and hiring to pricing and profitability. To gain a better understanding of how uncertainty induced by shifting trade policy shapes the behavior of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) the authors surveyed decision-makers at SMBs. The survey, administered by Morning Consult, was conducted in three waves: in December 2024, February 2025, and late April 2025. Each wave contained a nationally representative sample of about 600 SMBs.
Report
Who Will Pay for Tariffs? Businesses’ Expectations about Costs and Prices
Amid evolving global trade policy and rising tariff uncertainty, understanding how small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) form expectations about future costs and adjust their pricing is critical for assessing how the recently imposed tariffs on US imports could impact consumer prices. To that end, we analyze several waves of a survey of owners and other decision-makers at a nationally representative sample of US SMBs, defined as companies that employ 500 or fewer workers. We focus on waves conducted during the period of December 2024 to August 2025.
Report
Shaping the Future of Work: Workers’ Optimism and Pessimism about AI
The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution is here and is expected to transform the labor market, creating new opportunities for some workers while eliminating the jobs of others. At the end of 2024, the authors of this brief surveyed a sample of US household heads working in different industries and with different educational backgrounds to better understand how they view AI and its potential effects on their job prospects and financial well-being.
Report
Measuring the US Employment Situation Using Online Panels: The Yale Labor Survey
This report presents the results of a rapid, low-cost survey that collects labor market data for individuals in the United States. The Yale Labor Survey (YLS) used an online panel from YouGov to replicate statistics from the Current Population Survey (CPS), the government’s source of household labor market statistics. The YLS’s advantages include its timeliness, low cost, and ability to develop new questions quickly to study labor market patterns during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Although YLS estimates of unemployment and participation rates mirrored the broad trends in CPS ...