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Report
An overview of the Survey of Consumer Expectations
This report presents an overview of the Survey of Consumer Expectations, a new monthly online survey of a rotating panel of household heads. The survey collects timely information on consumers? expectations and decisions on a broad variety of topics, including but not limited to inflation, household finance, the labor market, and the housing market. There are three main goals of the survey: (1) measuring consumer expectations at a high frequency, (2) understanding how these expectations are formed, and (3) investigating the link between expectations and behavior. This report discusses the ...
Journal Article
An overview of the Survey of Consumer Expectations
The authors present an overview of the New York Fed?s Survey of Consumer Expectations, a monthly online survey of a rotating panel of household heads. The survey collects timely information on respondents? expectations and decisions on a broad variety of topics, including inflation, household finance, the labor market, and the housing market. It has three main goals: (1) measuring consumer expectations at a high frequency, (2) understanding how these expectations are formed, and (3) investigating the link between expectations and behavior. The authors discuss the origins of the survey, the ...
Report
Consumer Credit Reporting Data
Since the 2000s, economists across fields have increasingly used consumer credit reporting data for research. We introduce readers to the economics of and the institutional details of these data. Using examples from the literature, we provide practical guidance on how to use these data to construct economic measures of borrowing, consumption, credit access, financial distress, and geographic mobility. We explain what credit scores measure, and why. We highlight how researchers can access credit reporting data via existing datasets or by creating new datasets, including by linking credit ...
Journal Article
Behavior of a New Median PCE Measure: A Tale of Tails
We introduce two new measures of trend inflation, a median PCE inflation rate and a median PCE excluding OER inflation rate, and investigate their performance. Our analysis indicates that both perform comparably to other simple trend inflation estimators such as the trimmed-mean PCE. Furthermore, we find that the performance of the median PCE is related to skewness in the distribution of cross-sectional growth rates across categories in the PCE, and our results suggest that the Bowley skewness statistic may be useful in forecasting.
Speech
The past and future of supervisory stress testing design: remarks at the 2018 Federal Reserve Stress Testing Research Conference, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
Remarks at the 2018 Federal Reserve Stress Testing Research Conference, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Boston.
Journal Article
Residual Seasonality in GDP Growth Remains after Latest BEA Improvements
Measuring economic growth is complicated by seasonality, the regular fluctuation in economic activity that depends on the season of the year. The BEA uses statistical techniques to remove seasonality from its estimates of GDP, but some research has indicated that seasonality remains. As a result, the BEA began a three-phase plan in 2015 to improve its seasonal-adjustment techniques, and in July 2018, it completed phase 3. Our analysis indicates that even after these latest improvements by the BEA, residual seasonality in GDP growth remains. On average, this residual seasonality makes GDP ...
Speech
Now is the time for banking culture reform: remarks at Governance and Culture Reform Conference, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York City
Remarks at Governance and Culture Reform Conference, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York City.
Working Paper
Measuring Fairness in the U.S. Mortgage Market
Black Americans are both substantially more likely to have their mortgage application rejected and substantially more likely to default on their mortgages than White Americans. We take these stark inequalities as a starting point to ask the question: How fair or unfair is the U.S. mortgage market? We show that the answer to this question crucially depends on the definition of fairness. We consider six competing and widely used definitions of fairness and find that they lead to markedly different conclusions. We then combine these six definitions into a series of stylized facts that offer a ...
Journal Article
Why Are Headline PCE and Median PCE Inflations So Far Apart?
Mean (or headline) PCE inflation has typically fallen below median PCE inflation, and since 2012 the difference has been large. To understand the reasons for this trend, we investigate which components of the headline measure are contributing to the difference. We find that energy components, which frequently undergo wide price swings, and electronics, which have been steadily decreasing in price for decades, explain most of the difference between the two inflation measures. We argue that the outsized impacts of such components on headline PCE inflation reinforce the need for policymakers to ...
Report
Do we know what we owe? A comparison of borrower- and lender-reported consumer debt
Household surveys are the source of some of the most widely studied data on consumer balance sheets, with the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) generally cited as the leading source of wealth data for the United States. At the same time, recent research questions survey respondents? propensity and ability to report debt characteristics accurately. We compare household debt as reported by borrowers to the SCF with household debt as reported by lenders to Equifax using the new FRBNY Consumer Credit Panel (CCP). Moments of the borrower and lender debt distributions are compared by year, age of ...