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Journal Article
Decomposing the Low PCE Inflation Rate
The current low PCE inflation rate can largely be attributed to energy, health care, and housing.
Journal Article
The Wage Bills of COVID-19
The largest potential wage loss comes from the health care and social assistance industry.
Journal Article
Will Workers Want To Be Laid Off?
The short-term income benefits from expanded unemployment insurance are unlikely to outweigh the long-term benefits of working.
Journal Article
The Value of $600 Across States Hit Hardest by COVID-19
The CARES act provides an extra $600 per week in unemployment benefits, but the purchasing power of those dollars varies across states, raising the question of whether the equal distribution of $600 across states is an equitable distribution.
Journal Article
The Large Gap in Stock Market Participation Between Black and White Households
White households participate in the stock market far more than Black households, contributing to the large wealth gap between them.
Journal Article
Same Target, Different Economies: A Cross-Country Analysis of Inflation
Though some countries adopt a common inflation target, nations often have different patterns of inflation.
Journal Article
State Government Expenditures by Party Affiliation
While political divisions have widened considerably in the U.S., dominant political leanings do not appear to correlate with state government expenditures.
Journal Article
Understanding the Distribution of Inflation Expectations
Inflation expectations are central to monetary policy but are often summarized by a single statistic such as the mean or median forecast. This article argues for a distributional view in which the full cross-sectional distribution of beliefs is the relevant object. We first organize the literature around the main distributional features of inflation expectations: the level of expected inflation, disagreement across agents, subjective uncertainty within agents, skewness, and tail behavior. The literature consistently documents large and time-varying disagreement, systematic demographic ...
Journal Article
Regional Gasoline Price Dynamics
A large literature has argued that gasoline prices respond more rapidly to increases in oil prices than to decreases in oil prices. Moreover, some of this literature has found heterogeneous asymmetry in gas price responses across cities. Here, we reconsider the causes of heterogeneous asymmetric pass-through. Consistent with the previous literature, we find heterogeneity in the magnitudes of asymmetric pass-through across cities. We also find a large number of cities that exhibit no asymmetries. We then examine whether heterogeneous asymmetry results from city-level differences in (i) the ...
Journal Article
On the Relative Performance of Inflation Forecasts
Inflation expectations constitute important components of macroeconomic models and monetary policy rules. We investigate the relative performance of consumer, professional, market-based, and model-based inflation forecasts. Consistent with the previous literature, professional forecasts most accurately predict one-year-ahead year-over-year inflation. Both consumers and professionals overestimate inflation over their respective sample periods. Market-based forecasts as measured by the swap market breakeven inflation rates significantly overestimate actual inflation; Treasury ...