Search Results
Working Paper
Assessing the macroeconomic impact of bank intermediation shocks: a structural approach
We take a structural approach to assessing the empirical importance of shocks to the supply of bank-intermediated credit in affecting macroeconomic fluctuations. First, we develop a theoretical model to show how credit supply shocks can be transmitted into disruptions in the production economy. Second, we use the unique micro-banking data to identify and support the model's key mechanism. Third, we find that the output effect of credit supply shocks is not only economically and statistically significant but also consistent with the vector autogression evidence. Our mode estimation indicates ...
Working Paper
Communicating Data Uncertainty: Multi-Wave Experimental Evidence for UK GDP
Economic statistics are commonly published without estimates of their uncertainty. We conduct two waves of a randomized controlled online experiment to assess if and how the UK public understands data uncertainty. A control group observes only the point estimate of GDP. Treatment groups are presented with alternative qualitative and quantitative communications of GDP data uncertainty. We find that most of the public understands that GDP numbers are uncertain. Quantitative communications of data uncertainty help align the public’s subjective probabilistic expectations of data uncertainty ...
Working Paper
Climate Shocks in the Anthropocene Era: Should Net Domestic Product Be Affected by Climate Disasters
The monetary costs of weather and climate disasters in the U.S. have grown rapidly from 1980 to 2022, rising more than 5 percent in real terms annually. Much of this real growth in costs is likely due to climate change. Regardless of its cause, these costs imply a faster depreciation of real assets. We argue that the expected depreciation from these events could be included in the consumption of fixed capital, leading to lower levels, and slightly lower growth rates, for net domestic product (NDP). We use Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood regressions to estimate this expectation and to ...
Working Paper
Measuring the “Free” Digital Economy Within the GDP and Productivity Accounts
We develop an experimental methodology that values ?free? digital content through the lens of a production account and is consistent with the framework of the national accounts. We build upon the work in Nakamura, et al. (2016) by combining marketing- and advertising-supported content and find that the impact of ?free? digital content on U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) has accelerated in recent years, particularly since 2005. However, the explosion in ?free? digital content is partially offset by a decrease in ?free? print content like newspapers. Including these, real GDP growth would grow ...
Working Paper
Raiders of the Lost High-Frequency Forecasts: New Data and Evidence on the Efficiency of the Fed's Forecasting
We introduce a new dataset of real gross domestic product (GDP) growth and core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) inflation forecasts produced by the staff of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. In contrast to the eight Greenbook forecasts a year the staff produces for Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings, our dataset has roughly weekly forecasts. We use these new data to study whether the staff forecasts efficiently and whether efficiency, or lack thereof, is time-varying. Prespecified regressions of forecast errors on forecast revisions show that the staff's ...
Report
A Bayesian Approach to Inference on Probabilistic Surveys
We propose a nonparametric Bayesian approach for conducting inference on probabilistic surveys. We use this approach to study whether U.S. Survey of Professional Forecasters density projections for output growth and inflation from 1982 to 2022 are consistent with the noisy rational expectations hypothesis. Wefind that, in contrast to theory, for horizons close to two years there is no relationship whatsoever between subjective uncertainty and forecast accuracy for output growth density projections, both across forecasters and over time, and only a mild relationship for inflation projections. ...
Journal Article
Data Revisions of Aggregate Hours Worked: Implications for the Europe-U.S. Hours Gap
In this article, we document that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Conference Board?s Total Economy Database (TED) have substantially revised their measures of hours worked over time. Relying on the data used by Rogerson (2006) and Ohanian et al. (2008), we find that, for 2003, hours worked per person in Europe is 18 percent lower than hours worked in the United States. Using the 2016 releases of the same data for 2003 yields a gap that is 40 percent smaller?that is, only 11 percent lower. Using labor force survey data, which are less subject to data ...
Working Paper
The domestic segment of global supply chains in China under state capitalism
This paper proposes methods to incorporate firm heterogeneity in the standard IO-table based approach to portray the domestic segment of global value chains in a country. Using Chinese firm census data for both manufacturing and service sectors, along with constrained optimization techniques, we split the conventional IO table into sub-accounts, which are used to estimate direct and indirect domestic value added in exports of different types of firm. We find that in China, both state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and small and medium domestic private enterprises (SMEs) have much higher shares of ...