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Discussion Paper
A Penny for Your Thoughts? How Survey Comments Help Us Understand Our Region’s Labor Market
We regularly report the quantitative results from the Richmond Fed business surveys, but participants' comments also provide useful context for changes in local business conditions. Most recently, a survey of human resources professionals complemented our surveys of area businesses. The comments from both surveys have provided insight into the region's labor market, as well as indicated that the persistent challenge of finding workers has led executives and recruiters to intensify their efforts and expand the tools they use to attract workers.
Discussion Paper
How to Get the (High-Skilled) Workers?
Over the past year, the labor market has been extremely tight, with record high job openings and historically low unemployment. So, it's no surprise that firms have struggled to find workers. To overcome hiring challenges, firms have been using various strategies, the most common of which is wage increases. Those strategies may be paying off to some extent: Our Fifth District business surveys suggest that the worst of the challenge finding workers has passed. Nonetheless, firms are still reporting difficulties, and our most recent survey revealed a notable shift in the type of workers firms ...
Discussion Paper
Mapping Outcomes Across Rural and Urban Communities
How different are economic outcomes across rural and urban communities? What factors are at the heart of these differences? This year, we've been building our data products to help data users and local and state leaders gain quick insight into geographic differences across a range of indicators. This Regional Matters post presents several of the rural-urban comparison maps we've created, along with complementary data visualizations. We focus specifically on rural-urban differences in employment and educational attainment to highlight how these visualizations can be used.
Working Paper
Examining contributions to core consumer inflation measures
The purpose of this paper is to examine the composition of inflation over time. The authors calculate the contributions to inflation for individual series of the consumer price index (CPI) and personal consumption expenditures price index (PCEPI) and then aggregate those contributions into major consumer expenditure categories. This technique provides a wealth of information concerning aggregate inflation behavior in a concise way, enabling the authors to describe the composition of inflation at any point in time. A particularly important benefit of this method is that it allows them to ...
Discussion Paper
Signs of a Slowdown? Evidence From Our October Business Surveys
After a few months of upward movement in the headline indexes of our business surveys, results took a downward turn in October. This was especially true in the service sector, where both current and expected activity deteriorated noticeably. However, despite what may be evidence of a shift to a slower pace of demand, firms on balance appear to be holding steady on hiring plans, at least for the near term.
Discussion Paper
Gauging Unemployment Rates When Workers Are on the Sidelines
Working Paper
Using the Kalman filter to smooth the shocks of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model
This paper shows how to use the Kalman filter (Kalman 1960) to back out the shocks of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. In particular, we use the smoothing algorithm as described in Hamilton (1994) to estimate the shocks of a sticky-prices and sticky-wages model using all the information up to the end of the sample.
Discussion Paper
Inflation and the Price Expectations of Firms
n the spring of 2021, inflation started to climb above the Federal Open Market Committee's (FOMC) 2 percent target. By June 2022, the inflation rate had increased to territory not seen since the early 1980s – year-over-year growth in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) reached 9.1 percent, while growth in the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index (PCEPI), which is followed most closely by the FOMC, hit 7.0 percent. The most recent inflation readings are still extremely elevated—7.7 percent for the CPI (October 2022) and 6.2 percent for the PCEPI (September 2022).
Journal Article
Decomposing inflation
As U.S. core inflation measures have declined in recent years, analysts have renewed their efforts to understand inflation dynamics. A common approach to this issue is to make inferences about how price changes of major components affect the aggregate inflation rate. This article takes a more rigorous approach, calculating and plotting the precise contributions of major consumer expenditure categories to core inflation measures over time. ; This technique has distinct advantages. It highlights the underlying trends in inflation, enabling analysts to make more informed inferences about the ...