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Journal Article
Health care services depress recent PCE inflation readings
Health care services, which historically helped push core measures of inflation higher, have restrained recent readings. Among them is the personal consumption expenditures price index, favored by Federal Reserve policymakers deliberating interest rate changes.
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 ...
Working Paper
Campbell and Cochrane meet Melino and Yang: reverse engineering the surplus ratio in a Mehra-Prescott economy
The habit model of Campbell and Cochrane (1999) specifies a process for the 'surplus ratio'-the excess of consumption over habit, relative to consumption-rather than an evolution for the habit stock. It's not immediately apparent if their formulation can be accommodated within the Markov chain framework of Mehra and Prescott (1985). This note illustrates one way to create a Campbell and Cochrane-like model within the Mehra-Prescott framework. A consequence is that we can perform another sort of reverse-engineering exercize-we can calibrate the resulting model to match the stochastic discount ...
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
Monetary policy in a zero-interest-rate economy
Journal Article
Globalization: myths and realities
What the Trimmed Mean Says About Future Inflation: Broadening Price Pressures Ahead
As we look ahead to the rest of this year and into 2022, we expect that even as some of the extreme price increases responsible for the recent surge in headline inflation fade, a broader swath of goods and services will show meaningful price increases.
Working Paper
The political economy of endogenous taxation and redistribution
This paper examines a simple dynamic model in which agents vote over capital income taxation and redistributive transfers. We show that in equilibrium the typical agent's preferences over the tax rate are single-peaked and derive a closed-form solution for the majority-rule tax rate. We also show that high levels of initial wealth inequality can place the economy on the 'wrong side of the Laffer curve'.
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 ...