Search Results
Speech
Improving survey measures of inflation expectations
Remarks at Forecasters Club of New York, New York City.>
Working Paper
Starting small and ending big -- the effect of monetary incentives on response rates in the 2003 Survey of Small Business Finances: an observational experiment
In 2003, the Survey of Small Business Finances (SSBF), conducted by the Federal Reserve Board, implemented the use of incentives to increase response rates. This study examines the effects of some of the characteristics of the implementation - such as level of effort, time in queue, and consecutively-increasing incentive amounts - on unit response. Our estimates suggest that as the number of days increase between the initial screener and main interview, the probability of completion decreases. Similarly, as the number of days increases between each consecutive incentive offer the probability ...
Journal Article
Interview: Steven Davis
As a student at Central Catholic High School in Portland, Ore., in the mid-1970s, Steven Davis took an elective course on economics that piqued his interest. When he went on to college at Portland State University, he initially picked economics as his major but figured he might switch to sociology or international relations. In the end, however, economics won out. "Those fields struck me as interesting," he says, "but economics seemed to offer a more useful set of tools for understanding social and economic issues."
Journal Article
Improving survey measures of household inflation expectations
Expectations about future inflation are generally thought to play an important role in households' decisions about spending and saving. They are also of great interest to central bankers, who take them into account when determining policy or assessing the effectiveness of communications with the public. To help improve existing survey measures of inflation expectations, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently joined with other institutions and academic consultants to develop a set of survey questions that will yield more reliable information on households' inflation expectations, ...
Speech
Improving the measurement of inflation expectations
Remarks at the Barclays 16th Annual Global Inflation-Linked Conference, New York City.
Journal Article
President's Message: Learning From Our District
My Richmond Fed colleagues and I are on the ground in our district constantly, meeting and learning from community members. Last year, we had over 1,700 such engagements — with bankers, business and community leaders, workers, and public officials. These meetings take us to every corner of the states we serve.
Journal Article
Upfront: New from the Richmond Fed’s Regional Matters blog
Journal Article
Why is the market share of adjustable-rate mortgages so low?
Over the past several years, U.S. homebuyers have increasingly favored fixed-rate mortgages over adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs). Indeed, ARMs have dropped to less than 10 percent of all residential mortgage originations, a near-record low. One might speculate that the decline in the ARM share has been driven by ?one-off? factors relating to the financial crisis. However, a statistical analysis suggests that recent trends can largely be explained by the same factors that have historically shaped mortgage choice?most notably, the term structure of interest rates and its effects on the ...
Working Paper
Alternative methods of unit nonresponse weighting adjustments: an application from the 2003 Survey of Small Business Finances
The 2003 Survey of Small Business Finances (SSBF) screening interview had significant unit nonresponse and therefore some type of nonresponse adjustment was deemed necessary. The approach used in the 2003 survey differed from that used in previous surveys. The current paper examines the impact of this technique on weights, point estimates and variance of the estimates by comparing the approach ultimately implemented for the 2003 survey to alternative approaches. The results using the 2003 SSBF hybrid method are very similar to the traditional weighting class method and the propensity ...
Report
Rethinking the measurement of household inflation expectations: preliminary findings
This paper reports preliminary findings from a Federal Reserve Bank of New York research program aimed at improving survey measures of inflation expectations. We find that seemingly small differences in how inflation is referred to in a survey can lead respondents to consider significantly different price concepts. For near-term inflation, the "prices in general" question in the monthly Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers can elicit responses that focus on the most visible prices, such as gasoline or food. Questions on the "rate of inflation" can lead to responses on the ...