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Journal Article
Recent evidence on the muted inventory cycle
Inventories play an important role in business cycles. Inventory build-ups add momentum to the economy during expansions, while inventory liquidations sap economic strength during recessions. In addition, because inventory fluctuations are notoriously difficult to predict, they present considerable uncertainty in assessing the economic outlook.> The role of inventories in shaping the current outlook for the U.S. economy is particularly uncertain. In the early 1990s, inventory swings appeared less pronounced than usual, leading some analysts to conclude the business cycle might now be more ...
Journal Article
Has the productivity trend steepened in the 1990s?
In the 1990s, conventional measures of productivity growth, or the growth in output per worker, have indicated a dramatic rise. If these measures are correct, the economic benefits are clear. In the short run, sustained, faster productivity growth would enable the economy to expand more rapidly without intensifying inflationary pressures. In the long run, sustained, faster productivity growth would boost real incomes and improve the standard of living.> Despite signs that productivity has recently begun to follow a steeper path, some analysts are skeptical. Episodes of faster productivity ...
Working Paper
The Globalisation of Inflation: the Growing Importance of Global Value Chains
Greater international economic interconnectedness over recent decades has been changing inflation dynamics. This paper presents evidence that the expansion of global value chains (GVCs), ie cross-border trade in intermediate goods and services, is an important channel through which global economic slack influences domestic inflation. In particular, we document the extent to which the growth in GVCs explains the established empirical correlation between global economic slack and national inflation rates, both across countries and over time. Accounting for the role of GVCs, we also find that ...
Journal Article
The outlook for housing: the role of demographic and cyclical factors
With the current U.S. economic expansion now in its sixth year, the economy appears to be on a path of stable growth. Such a development would be beneficial because it would foster steady gains in employment, income, and investment, all of which would help boost the overall standard of living. To maintain such a healthy course, most sectors of the economy need to be solid performers. The housing sector is an especially important component of the economy, having generated $1.5 trillion in output in 1995, or one-fifth of the nation's gross domestic product.> Whether housing activity will ...
Journal Article
New evidence on the output cost of fighting inflation
The Federal Reserve has made significant progress toward price stability over the last two decades. The annual inflation rate has declined from 13 percent in the early 1980s to roughly 2 percent today. But, to be sure, the current low-inflation environment has come at a price.> One key cost of achieving low inflation is the output loss that generally accompanies a permanent decline in inflation, as occurred in the early 1980s and early 1990s. Another more subtle output cost of fighting inflation is the cost of preventing inflation from rising. As incipient inflation pressures build, tighter ...
Working Paper
International co-movements of business cycles
Working Paper
Business cycle phases and their transitional dynamics
Working Paper
Cyclically-adjusted measures of structural trend breaks: an application to productivity trends in the 1990s
This paper compares several linear trend break models of labor productivity. One empirical problem that arises when estimating trends in macroeconomic data is the influence of cyclical behavior on tests of trend breaks. Using various methods to correct for cyclical influences, this paper finds that a simple linear trend model with a small number of breaks aptly characterizes aggregate productivity. Moreover, this paper confirms previous research that has found that the aggregate productivity trend has not steepened in the 1990s. Econometrically, this paper shows the benefits of using ...
Working Paper
Using near-VARs to examine phase-dependent monetary and fiscal policy
Economic policies are known to have different effects on the economy depending on the size of policy changes and on business cycle conditions. For example, monetary policy might be more stimulative in recessions and around turning points in the business cycle than during expansions. Such dependencies, however, are usually ignored in most empirical research or are placed under the rubric of "long and variable lags." Accounting for phase-dependent policies holds out the possibility not only of better forecasting performance with our macroeconomic models and of more accurate methods to ...
Working Paper
Business cycle turning points: two empirical business cycle model approaches
This paper compares a set of non-nested empirical business cycle models. The alternative linear models include a VAR and Stock and Watson's (1991) unobserved components model. The alternative nonlinear models include the time-varying transition probability Markov switching model (Filardo 1993) and an integration of the Markov switching model with the Stock and Watson model as proposed by Diebold and Rudebusch (1994) and Chauvet (1994). Generally, this paper finds that no one model dominates in a predictive sense at all times. The nonlinear models, however, tend to outperform the linear models ...