Search Results
Journal Article
To Improve the Accuracy of GDP Growth Forecasts, Add Financial Market Conditions
More timely data on current macroeconomic conditions can reduce uncertainty about forecasts, helping policymakers mitigate the risk of extreme economic outcomes. We find that incorporating financial market conditions along with current macroeconomic conditions improves the forecast accuracy of future GDP growth. Forecasts based only on current macroeconomic conditions eventually converge to those incorporating financial market conditions, lending further support to this approach.
Working Paper
Accounting for Growth in the Age of the Internet The Importance of Output-Saving Technical Change
We extend the conventional Solow growth accounting model to allow innovation to affect consumer welfare directly. Our model is based on Lancaster?s New Approach to Consumer Theory, in which there is a separate ?consumption technology? that transforms the produced goods, measured at production cost, into utility. This technology can shift over time, allowing consumers to make more efficient use of each dollar of income. This is ?output-saving? technical change, in contrast to the Solow TFP ?resource-saving? technical change. One implication of our model is that living standards can rise at a ...
Newsletter
The Effect of Weather on First-Quarter GDP
In a pattern similar to that of the previous year, the U.S. economy appeared to slow down this past winter. The Bureau of Economic Analysis currently estimates that gross domestic product (GDP) grew at 0.6% (at an annualized rate) in the first quarter of 2015. And as in the previous year, harsh winter weather has been cited by some observers as being responsible for the slowdown. However, there is substantial disagreement on the impact of weather on economic activity.
Discussion Paper
The Effect of the Strong Dollar on U.S. Growth
The recent strengthening of the U.S. dollar has raised concerns about its impact on U.S. GDP growth. The U.S. dollar has appreciated around 12 percent since mid-2014, rising against almost all of our trading partners, with the largest gains against Japan, Mexico, Canada, and the euro area. There was far less movement against newly industrial Asian economies and hardly any change against China. In this blog, we ask how the strength of the dollar affects U.S. GDP growth. Although the dollar can impact the U.S. growth through a number of different channels, we focus on the direct impact through ...
Report
Newer need not be better: evaluating the Penn World Tables and the World Development Indicators using nighttime lights
Nighttime lights data are a measure of economic activity whose measurement error is plausibly independent of the errors of most conventional indicators. Therefore, we can use nighttime lights as an independent benchmark to assess existing measures of economic activity (Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin 2016). We employ this insight to find out which vintages of the Penn World Tables (PWT) and of the World Development Indicators (WDI) better estimate true income per capita. We find that revisions of the PWT do not necessarily dominate their predecessors in terms of explaining nighttime lights (and ...
Report
Aggregate Output Measurements: A Common Trend Approach
We analyze a model for N different measurements of a persistent latent time series when measurement errors are mean-reverting, which implies a common trend among measurements. We study the consequences of overdifferencing, finding potentially large biases in maximum likelihood estimators of the dynamics parameters and reductions in the precision of smoothed estimates of the latent variable, especially for multiperiod objects such as quinquennial growth rates. We also develop an R2 measure of common trend observability that determines the severity of misspecification. Finally, we apply our ...
Speech
The Economic Recovery: Are We There Yet?
Remarks at Women in Housing and Finance 2021 Annual Symposium (delivered via videoconference).
Working Paper
Measurement Error in Macroeconomic Data and Economics Research: Data Revisions, Gross Domestic Product, and Gross Domestic Income
We analyze the effect of measurement error in macroeconomic data on economics research using two features of the estimates of latent US output produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). First, we use the fact that the BEA publishes two theoretically identical estimates of latent US output that only differ due to measurement error: the more well-known gross domestic product (GDP), which the BEA constructs using expenditure data, and gross domestic income (GDI), which the BEA constructs using income data. Second, we use BEA revisions to previously published releases of GDP and GDI. ...
Journal Article
Waiting for a Pickup: GDP and the Sharing Economy
Briefing
Recession Predictors: An Evaluation
In the first half of 2022, real GDP has declined in each quarter, but the unemployment rate has remained at historically low levels. Since past recessions have been associated with a sharp increase of the unemployment rate, we are unlikely to be in a recession, but the consecutive GDP declines could suggest that a recession is imminent. This Economic Brief reviews the evidence on yield spreads, which past research has shown to be useful recession predictors. Current readings of these indicators do not yet suggest that the onset of a recession within the next year is very likely.