Search Results
Discussion Paper
What do various wage measures tell us about underlying wage growth?
We develop a novel indicator of aggregate and sectoral wage inflation by leveraging multiple sources of wage data with detailed sectoral information, using a hierarchical dynamic factor model. Our empirical approach controls for data-specific measurement errors and industry-specific developments; this feature makes it particularly effective in assessing wage inflation during the Covid era, which saw increased dispersion in wage inflation across industries and larger divergences between measures of the level and trajectory of wage inflation. Our findings indicate that as the labor market has ...
Working Paper
Effects of Monetary Policy on Household Expectations: The Role of Homeownership
We study the role of homeownership in the effectiveness of monetary policy on households' expectations. Empirically, we find that homeowners revise down their near-term inflation expectations and their optimism about future labor market conditions in response to a rise in mortgage rates, while renters are less likely to do so. We further show that the monetary-policy component of mortgage-rate changes creates the difference in expectation revisions between homeowners and renters. This result suggests that homeowners are attentive to news on interest rates and adjust their expectations ...
Working Paper
Measuring Labor-Force Participation and the Incidence and Duration of Unemployment
The underlying data from which the U.S. unemployment rate, labor-force participation rate, and duration of unemployment are calculated contain numerous internal contradictions. This paper catalogs these inconsistencies and proposes a reconciliation. We find that the usual statistics understate the unemployment rate and the labor-force participation rate by about two percentage points on average and that the bias in the latter has increased since the Great Recession. The BLS estimate of the average duration of unemployment overstates by 50% the true duration of uninterrupted spells of ...
Working Paper
Disagreement About the Term Structure of Inflation Expectations
We develop a model of the individual term structure of inflation expectations across forecasting horizons. Using the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we decompose disagreement about inflation expectations into individuals' long-term beliefs, private information, and public information. We find that in normal times, long-horizon disagreement is predominantly driven by individuals' long-term beliefs, while short-horizon disagreement stems from private information. During economic downturns, heterogeneous reactions to public information become a key driver of disagreement at all horizons. ...
Working Paper
The Role of Observed and Unobserved Heterogeneity in the Duration of Unemployment Spells
This paper studies the degree to which observable and unobservable worker characteristics account for the variation in the aggregate duration of unemployment. I model the distribution of unobserved worker heterogeneity as time varying to capture the interaction of latent attributes with changes in labor-market conditions. Unobserved heterogeneity is the main explanation for the duration dependence of unemployment hazards. Both cyclical and low-frequency variations in the mean duration of unemployment are mainly driven by one subgroup: workers who, for unobserved reasons, stay unemployed for a ...
Discussion Paper
A New Indicator of Common Wage Inflation
The cyclical state of the economy and the natural rate of unemployment are key unobserved variables in policymakers' analysis of economic developments. The price Phillips curve relates the measures of resource utilization—often through deviations of the unemployment rate from the natural rate of unemployment—to consumer price inflation.
Working Paper
Revealing Cluster Structures Based on Mixed Sampling Frequencies
This paper proposes a new nonparametric mixed data sampling (MIDAS) model and develops a framework to infer clusters in a panel regression with mixed frequency data. The nonparametric MIDAS estimation method is more flexible and substantially simpler to implement than competing approaches. We show that the proposed clustering algorithm successfully recovers true membership in the cross-section, both in theory and in simulations, without requiring prior knowledge of the number of clusters. This methodology is applied to a mixed-frequency Okun's law model for state-level data in the U.S. and ...
Working Paper
Heterogeneity in the Dynamics of Disaggregate Unemployment
This paper explores the role that unobserved heterogeneity within an observed category plays in the dynamics of disaggregate unemployment and in the cross-sectional differences across individuals of the duration of unemployment spells. The distribution of unobserved heterogeneity is characterized as a mixture of two distributions with each mean and weight determined by the inflows and outflows of workers with unobserved types H and L, which are identified based on the nonlinear state-space model of Ahn and Hamilton (2016). I found that the contribution of each factor to the dynamics of ...
Discussion Paper
Index of Common Inflation Expectations
Data that are potentially informative about the inflation expectations of economic agents have grown over recent years and now include information from a wide variety of surveys as well as from financial instruments. These data differ along several key dimensions, including the type of economic agent, the horizon of the expectation, the source of data (survey versus market-based measures), and the associated inflation concept, which can make the co-movement of various expectations measures difficult to discern.
Working Paper
Relative prices and pure inflation since the mid-1990s
This paper decomposes consumer price inflation into pure inflation, relative price inflation, and idiosyncratic inflation by estimating a dynamic factor model á la Reis and Watson (2010) on a data set of 146 monthly disaggregated prices from 1995 to 2019. We find that pure inflation is the trend around which PCE price inflation fluctuates, while relative price inflation and idiosyncratic inflation drive the fluctuation of PCE price inflation around the trend. Unlike Reis and Watson, we find that labor market slack is the main driver of pure inflation and that energy prices account for ...