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Working Paper
Technology and the Task Content of Jobs across the Development Spectrum
The tasks workers perform on the job are informative about the direction and the impact of technological change. We harmonize occupational task content measures between two worker-level surveys, which separately cover developing and developed countries. Developing countries use routine-cognitive tasks and routine-manual tasks more intensively than developed countries, but less intensively use non-routine analytical tasks and non-routine interpersonal tasks. This is partly because developing countries have more workers in occupations with high routine contents and fewer workers in occupations ...
Working Paper
Federal reserve forecasts: asymmetry and state-dependence
We jointly test the rationality of the Federal Reserve?s Greenbook forecasts of infiation, unemployment, and output growth using a multivariate nonseparable asymmetric loss function. We find that the forecasts are rationalizable and exhibit directional asymmetry. The degree of asymmetry depends on the phase of the business cycle: The Greenbook forecasts of output growth are too pessimistic in recessions and too optimistic in expansions. The change in monetary policy that occured in the late 1970s has been attributed in the literature to the Fed coming to terms with the difficulties in ...
Working Paper
Asymmetry, Complementarities, and State Dependence in Federal Reserve Forecasts
Forecasts are a central component of policy making; the Federal Reserve''s forecasts are published in a document called the Greenbook. Previous studies of the Greenbook''s inflation forecasts have found them to be rationalizable but asymmetric if considering particular sub-periods, e.g., before and after the Volcker appointment. In these papers, forecasts are analyzed in isolation, assuming policymakers value them independently. We analyze the Greenbook fore- casts in a framework in which the forecast errors are allowed to interact. We find that allowing the losses to interact makes the ...