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Which Core to Believe? Trimmed Mean Versus Ex-Food-and-Energy Inflation
Twice since 2014, core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) inflation—inflation excluding food and energy—decelerated sharply, only to ultimately reverse course.
Working Paper
Trimmed mean PCE inflation
Research over the past decade has led to improved measures of core inflation in the Consumer Price Index, or CPI. This paper discusses the application of some of the insights and techniques of that line of research to the Federal Reserve Bard of Governors? preferred inflation gauge, the price index for Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE). The result is a new measure of core PCE inflation?the trimmed mean PCE?and a somewhat different characterization of the economy?s recent inflation experience. ; Compared to the story told by the usual ?excluding food and energy? measure, the trimmed mean ...
Journal Article
A fitter, trimmer core inflation measure
Surging House Prices Expected to Propel Rent Increases, Push Up Inflation
The inflation rates of rent and owners’ equivalent rent (OER)—the amount of rent equivalent to the cost of ownership—have declined sharply since the COVID-19 pandemic began in February 2020. However, we expect rent inflation and OER inflation to accelerate in the years to come.
Working Paper
The Politics of Flat Taxes
We study the determination of flat tax systems using a workhorse macroeconomic model of inequality. Our first result is that, despite the multidimensional policy space, equilibrium policies are typically unique (up to a fine grid numerical approximation). The majority voting outcome features (i) zero labor income taxation, (ii) simultaneous use of capital income and consumption taxation, and (iii) generally low transfers. We discuss the role of three factors?the initial heterogeneity in sources of income, the mobility of income and wealth, and the forward-looking aspect of voting?in ...
Dallas Fed Mobility and Engagement Index Gives Insight into COVID-19’s Economic Impact
To gain insight into the economic impact of the pandemic, we developed an index of mobility and engagement, based on geolocation data collected from a large sample of mobile devices.
Journal Article
Two Measures of Core Inflation: A Comparison
Trimmed-mean personal consumption expenditure (PCE) inflation does not clearly dominate PCE inflation excluding food and energy in real-time forecasting of headline PCE inflation. However, trimmed-mean inflation is the superior communications and policy tool because it has been a less-biased real-time estimator of headline inflation and because it more successfully filters out headline inflation?s transitory variation, leaving only cyclical and trend components.
Working Paper
Real business cycle dynamics under first-order risk aversion
This paper incorporates preferences that display first-order risk aversion (FORA) into a standard real business cycle model. Although FORA preferences represent a sharp departure from the expected utility/constant relative risk aversion (EU/CRRA) preferences common in the business cycle literature, the change has only a negligible effect on the model s second moment implications. In fact, for what I argue is an empirically reasonable "ballpark" calibration of the FORA preferences, the moment implications are essentially identical to those under EU/CRRA, while the welfare cost of aggregate ...
Working Paper
Disastrous disappointments: asset-pricing with disaster risk and disappointment aversion
In this paper, I combine disappointment aversion, as employed by Routledge and Zin and Campanale, Castro and Clementi, with rare disasters in the spirit of Rietz, Barro, Gourio, Gabaix and others. I find that, when the model's representative agent is endowed with an empirically plausible degree of disappointment aversion, a rare disaster model can produce moments of asset returns that match the data reasonably well, using disaster probabilities and disaster sizes much smaller than have been employed previously in the literature. This is good news. Quantifying the disaster risk faced by any ...
Working Paper
Inequality, inflation, and central bank independence
What can account for the different contemporaneous inflation experiences of various countries, and of the same country over time? We present an analysis of the determination of inflation from a political economy perspective. We document a positive correlation between income inequality and inflation and then present a theory of the determination of inflation outcomes in democratic societies that illustrates how greater inequality leads to greater inflation, owing to a desire by voters for wealth redistribution. We conclude by showing that democracies with more independent central banks tend to ...