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Journal Article
What do chain store sales tell us about consumer spending?
Released at both weekly and monthly intervals, chain store indexes provide a timely measure of the sales performance of large retail companies. This article investigates whether the indexes can also play a role in tracking and forecasting consumer spending as a whole. The authors begin by exploring the extent to which developments in chain store sales are representative of retail sales trends overall. They then conduct formal statistical tests of the relationship between chain store data and official measures of total retail sales and personal consumption expenditure. They find that monthly ...
Journal Article
The supply-side consequences of U.S. fiscal policy in the 1980s
Fiscal policy changes in the 1980s had several possible implications for the long-run performance of the U.S. economy. The authors review the impact of tax reductions on saving, investment, and work effort, the implications of increased federal deficits for national saving and private investment, and the effect of shifts in the composition of government spending on public capital formation and on research and development. Using results from the empirical literature, the authors attempt to quantify the effects of these fiscal changes on the nation's economic potential.
Journal Article
The commodity-consumer price connection: fact or fable?
The recent surge in commodity prices has rekindled interest in their power to predict consumer price inflation. But is this interest warranted? In examining the empirical relationship between commodity prices and consumer price inflation, this article finds that commodities' reputation as useful leading indicators of inflation is actually based more on fable than fact. Testing eight commonly used indexes, the authors conclude that although commodities had some predictive power in the past, the commodity-consumer price connection has broken down in the more recent period. They argue that this ...
Journal Article
Forecasting automobile output
Journal Article
The employment report and the dollar
Perhaps no piece of news garners more attention in exchange markets than the U.S. employment report. Yet there has been only limited research on the market's response to the monthly release. This article quantifies the impact of the report and explains why exchange market sensitivity to the employment announcements has increased over time.
Report
What do chain store sales tell us about consumer spending?
In recent years, the sales reports of major retail chains have received increasing attention as timely indicators of consumer spending. Despite this attention, a close review of the literature on chain store indexes as macroeconomic indicators reveals that there is no literature! This paper fills this gap, showing how chain store data fit into the broader issues of how we measure and forecast consumer spending. We describe the linkages between chain store data and official measures of consumer spending, highlighting the key seasonality and pricing issues. We then present a battery of ...