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JEL Classification:D84 

Working Paper
COVID-19 Is a Persistent Reallocation Shock

Drawing on data from the firm-level Survey of Business Uncertainty, we present three pieces of evidence that COVID-19 is a persistent reallocation shock. First, rates of excess job and sales reallocation over 24-month periods have risen sharply since the pandemic struck, especially for sales. We compute these rates by aggregating over monthly firm-level observations that look back 12 months and ahead 12 months. Second, as of December 2020, firm-level forecasts of sales revenue growth over the next year imply a continuation of recent changes, not a reversal. Third, COVID-19 shifted relative ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2021-3

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.
Current Policy Perspectives , Paper 25-16

Working Paper
Inflation expectations and nonlinearities in the Phillips curve

This paper shows that a simple form of nonlinearity in the Phillips curve can explain why, following the Great Recession, inflation did not decrease as much as predicted by linear Phillips curves, a phenomenon known as the missing disinflation. We estimate a piecewise-linear specification and document that the data favor a model with two regions, with the response of inflation to an increase in unemployment slower in the region where unemployment is already high. Nonlinearities remain important, even when we account for other factors proposed in the literature, such as consumer expectations ...
Working Papers , Paper 17-11

Working Paper
Household inflation expectations and consumer spending: evidence from panel data

With nominal interest rates at the zero lower bound, an important question for monetary policy is whether, as predicted in prior theoretical work, an increase in inflation expectations would boost current consumer spending. Using survey panel data for the period from April 2009 to November 2012, we examine the relationship between a household's inflation expectations and its current spending, taking into account other factors such as the household's wage growth expectations, the uncertainty surrounding its inflation expectations, macroeconomic conditions, and unobserved heterogeneity at the ...
Working Papers , Paper 13-25

Working Paper
Inflation Thresholds and Inattention

Inflation expectations are key to economic activity, and in the current economic climate of a heated labor market, they are central to the policy debate. At the same time, a growing literature on inattention suggests that individuals, and therefore individual behavior, may not be sensitive to changes in inflation when it is low. This paper explores evidence of such inattention by constructing three different measures based on the University of Michigan’s Survey of Consumers 1-year ahead inflation expectations. Exploring inflation thresholds of 2, 3, and 4 percent, our findings are ...
Working Papers , Paper 19-14

Working Paper
Fiscal Expansions in the Era of Low Real Interest Rates

Low natural real interest rates limit the power of monetary policy to revive the economy due to the zero lower bound (ZLB) on the nominal interest rate. Fiscal stabilization via higher government debt is frequently recommended as a policy to raise the natural real interest rate. This paper builds a non-Ricardian framework to study the tradeoffs associated with a debt-financed fiscal expansion and show that even in a low real interest rate environment, higher debt doesn’t necessarily raise the real interest rate. The effect of the expansion is non-monotonic: Increasing debt raises the ...
Working Papers , Paper 20-11

Working Paper
Household Beliefs about Fiscal Dominance

We study beliefs about fiscal dominance using a survey of German households. We first design and conduct a randomized controlled trial to identify how fiscal news impacts individuals’ debt-to-GDP and inflation expectations. We document that the link between debt and inflation crucially depends on individuals’ views about the fiscal space. News leading individuals to expect a higher debt-to-GDP ratio makes them more likely to revise their inflation expectations upward. These average effects are driven by individuals who think that fiscal resources are stretched. By contrast, individuals ...
Working Papers , Paper 25-2

Working Paper
State-Dependent Sticky Expectations: Evidence and Theory

We document novel stylized facts regarding updating of households' inflation expectations. Using two randomized controlled trials fielded in the US and Germany where signals in the form of professionals' inflation forecasts have different perceived levels of precision, we show that households react more to information with higher levels of precision, in line with Bayesian updating. However, in contrast to Bayesian updating, they mostly respond differently to these signals in the decision to update expectations (extensive margin) and not in the size of the adjustment (intensive margin). The ...
Working Papers , Paper 25-23

Working Paper
The Informational Effect of Monetary Policy and the Case for Policy Commitment

I study how the informational effect of monetary policy changes the optimal conduct of monetary policy. In my model, the private sector extracts information about unobserved shocks from the central bank's interest rate decisions. The central bank optimally changes the informational effect of the interest rate by committing to a state-contingent policy rule, in which case the Phillips curve becomes endogenous to the central bank's optimization problem. In a dynamic model, the optimal policy rule overshoots the natural-rate shock and gradually responds to the cost-push shock, which makes the ...
Working Papers , Paper 19-07R

Working Paper
Fireside Chats: Communication and Consumers’ Expectations in the Great Depression

This paper shows how policy announcements can be used to manage expectations and have a role as a policy tool. Using regional variation in radio exposure, I evaluate the impact of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1935 Fireside Chat, in which he showcased the introduction of important social policies, establishing a new cycle of the New Deal. I document that cities with higher exposure to the announcement exhibited a significant increase in spending on durable goods. I provide evidence that this result is not driven by wealth or other potentially confounding variables. The estimated effect ...
Working Papers , Paper 20-30

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Koşar, Gizem 16 items

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