Search Results
Journal Article
Payroll employment data: measuring the effects of annual benchmark revisions
During the recovery from the 2001 recession, the business press and economic analysts used payroll employment data released monthly by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) as evidence of protracted weakness in the labor market. But using these monthly releases for this type of analysis can be premature and potentially misleading. The initial BLS releases can differ substantially from payroll employment data that are revised to incorporate information from less timely but more complete sources. ; This article highlights the historical revisions to the aggregate nonfarm payroll employment ...
Journal Article
Smoothing the shocks of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model
In some ways, the recession of 2001 and the recovery that followed it were unique: During the recession, the contraction in measured output was driven almost entirely by a retrenchment in business capital spending while consumer spending and residential investment remained positive. And the recovery was marked by moderate, uneven gross domestic product growth and job market weakness that were historically unusual. These events raise questions about the conventional wisdom on post?World War II business cycles. ; To help answer these questions, the authors use a general equilibrium model with ...
Journal Article
Decomposing inflation
As U.S. core inflation measures have declined in recent years, analysts have renewed their efforts to understand inflation dynamics. A common approach to this issue is to make inferences about how price changes of major components affect the aggregate inflation rate. This article takes a more rigorous approach, calculating and plotting the precise contributions of major consumer expenditure categories to core inflation measures over time. ; This technique has distinct advantages. It highlights the underlying trends in inflation, enabling analysts to make more informed inferences about the ...
Working Paper
Examining contributions to core consumer inflation measures
The purpose of this paper is to examine the composition of inflation over time. The authors calculate the contributions to inflation for individual series of the consumer price index (CPI) and personal consumption expenditures price index (PCEPI) and then aggregate those contributions into major consumer expenditure categories. This technique provides a wealth of information concerning aggregate inflation behavior in a concise way, enabling the authors to describe the composition of inflation at any point in time. A particularly important benefit of this method is that it allows them to ...
Working Paper
Using the Kalman filter to smooth the shocks of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model
This paper shows how to use the Kalman filter (Kalman 1960) to back out the shocks of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. In particular, we use the smoothing algorithm as described in Hamilton (1994) to estimate the shocks of a sticky-prices and sticky-wages model using all the information up to the end of the sample.
Report
Unsustainable fiscal policy: implications for monetary policy
Federal government debt held by the public reached 67.7 percent of gross domestic product in 2011, and trends point to large budget deficits for many years to come. In this essay, economics writer Renee Haltom and research director John Weinberg explore the implications for monetary policy if the United States ever approached its "fiscal limit." In that scenario, the Federal Reserve might face pressure to produce inflation revenue. The authors conclude that the United States must avoid this scenario by placing fiscal policy on a more sustainable path
Discussion Paper
How Many Businesses in the Fifth District are Minority-Owned?
Discussion Paper
Gauging Unemployment Rates When Workers Are on the Sidelines