Working Paper
Rising Market Concentration and the Decline of Food Price Shock Pass-Through to Core Inflation
Brown, Jason; Colton, Tousey (2019-06-13)
Using a vector autoregression that allows for time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility, we show that U.S. core inflation became 75 percent less responsive to shocks in food prices since the late 1970s. The decline in the pass-through of food price shocks to inflation is a result of a decline in both volatility and the persistence of food price changes in inflation. This decline in pass-through coincides with a period of increasing concentration in the food supply chain, especially among U.S. grocery retailers and distributors. We find that 60 percent of the variation in pass-through ...
Research Working Paper , Paper RWP 19-2

Journal Article
The Shifting Expectations for Work from Home
Brown, Jason; Colton, Tousey (2023-02-23)
As COVID-19 moves to an endemic state, employers have brought workers back to the office. Many workers prefer to continue working from home a portion of time, resulting in a gap between employee preferences for work from home and employer plans. Knowing who currently works from home a larger share of time and where this gap is narrowest across worker characteristics and locations helps explain where and for whom work from home is most likely to remain a permanent feature in the labor market.Using a relatively new data source, the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, Jason P. Brown ...
Economic Review , Volume vol.108 , Issue no.2 , Pages 22

Journal Article
Drilling Productivity in the United States: What Lies Beneath
Brown, Jason; Colton, Tousey; Rodziewicz, David (2019-05-22)
We construct new measures of drilling productivity and find that productivity increased sixfold from the mid-2000s to early 2017. Gains in below-ground efficiency?the number of barrels produced per foot of drilled wells?have largely driven this increase in overall productivity. The large oil price declines during the Great Recession and from 2014 to 2016 also played a role. However, further large increases in productivity are unlikely absent additional improvements in technology or a subsequent large downturn in oil prices.
Economic Bulletin , Issue May 22, 2019 , Pages 5