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Discussion Paper
Is China Really Growing at 5 Percent?
Chinese authorities recently announced a growth target of "around 5 percent" for 2025, the same as their 2024 target. Five percent is about half the pace of growth that China sustained from the 1980s to the early 2010s, but it is nonetheless quite high for an economy flirting with deflation and mired in a years-long property bust.
Discussion Paper
Model Perspectives on Supply and Demand Factors behind a Soft Labor Market
U.S. employment growth slowed down notably in the second part of 2025, and a key question is how much of the weakness stems from labor demand and how much from labor supply. In this note, we examine this question from the point of view of two different models: a statistical model that uses an intuitive interpretation of the joint behavior of employment and wage growth to infer the effects of labor supply and demand (VAR), and a structural dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model that uses a much wider array of data.
Discussion Paper
International Measures of Common Inflation
A key challenge for monetary policymakers in achieving their inflation goals—particularly important at the current juncture—is to be able to distinguish between persistent inflationary changes and short-term idiosyncratic shocks. The most common approach for filtering out short-term price shocks from inflation is to focus on measures of "core" inflation, traditionally defined as the change in the consumer price index (CPI) excluding food and energy prices.
Discussion Paper
Is Trend Inflation at Risk of Becoming Unanchored? The Role of Inflation Expectations
Since the start of the pandemic, views about the evolution of aggregate consumer prices moved swiftly from concerns about deflation to fears about excessive inflation. It is hard to find a parallel in the history of the U.S. economy—or the global economy more generally—to this rapid reversal of risks to the inflation outlook.
Discussion Paper
The SNB-FRB-BIS High-Level Conference on Inflation Risk and Uncertainty
Uncertainty about inflation has risen considerably across the globe since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lack of clarity about how far inflation might fall during the depths of the pandemic gave way to concerns about inflationary pressures as demand surged and supply was constrained throughout 2021.
Discussion Paper
Drivers of Post-pandemic Inflation in Selected Advanced Economies and Implications for the Outlook
With the reopening of economies from strict COVID-19 lockdowns and the war-induced sharp increases in food, energy, and other commodity prices, headline inflation has surged globally, as shown for a few selected advanced economies by the black line in the left panel of figure 1. Core inflation (the dashed red line) has also risen sharply and has become increasingly persistent across these economies.
Discussion Paper
Global Implications of Brighter U.S. Productivity Prospects
Investment related to artificial intelligence (AI) is booming in the U.S. compared to other countries, as shown in figure 1. Moreover, new business registrations have surged in the U.S. since the pandemic, unlike in the euro area where new business registrations remained flat (de Soyres et al. 2024).
Discussion Paper
Lessons from the Co-movement of Inflation around the World
The aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic saw a surge in inflation around the world, reflecting rapid increases in the demand for goods, strained supply chains, tight labor markets, and sharp hikes in commodity prices exacerbated by the Russian war on Ukraine. As illustrated in figure 1, this inflation surge was synchronized across advanced and emerging economies, not only for total inflation but also for its core component.
Working Paper
Quantifying Deregulation and its Economic Effects: A Large Language Model Approach
We construct a news-based index of deregulation for the United States from 1960 through 2025 using AI to semantically classify newspaper articles. We distinguish articles discussing deregulation from those discussing increased regulation, assigning intensity scores that reflect both the centrality of deregulatory content and whether articles discuss advocacy, proposals, or enacted measures. Human validation confirms strong agreement between AI and human classifications. The deregulation index captures major reform episodes including transportation and telecommunications liberalization in the ...
Working Paper
News and Uncertainty Shocks
We provide novel evidence that technological news and uncertainty shocks, identified one at a time using VAR models as in the literature, are correlated; that is, they are not truly structural. We then proceed by proposing an identification scheme to disentangle the effects of news and financial uncertainty shocks. We find that by removing uncertainty effects from news shocks, the positive responses of economic activity to news shocks are strengthened in the short term; and that the negative responses of activity to financial uncertainty shocks are deepened in the medium term as ?good ...