Search Results
Journal Article
Introducing the St. Louis Fed Price Pressures Measure
Assessing inflation?s likely path matters to policymakers and those in financial markets.
Could More Progressive Taxes Increase Income Inequality?
One paper posits that making taxes more progressive could boost lower-income households initially, but more money would eventually float to those with higher incomes.
Working Paper
Tax Progressivity, Economic Booms and Trickle-Up Economics
We propose a method to decompose changes in the tax structure into orthogonal components measuring the level and progressivity of taxes. Similar to tax shocks found in the existing empirical literature, the level shock is contractionary. The tax progressivity shock is expansionary: Increasing tax progressivity raises (lowers) disposable income at the bottom (top) end of the income distribution by shifting the tax burden from the bottom to the top. If agents’ marginal propensity to consume falls with income, the rise in consumption at the bottom more than compensates for the decline in ...
Journal Article
A Bad Moon Rising? Uncertainty Shocks and Economic Outcomes
Economic uncertainty is highest in recent decades.
Journal Article
A Measure of Price Pressures
The Federal Reserve devotes significant resources to forecasting key economic variables such as real gross domestic product growth, employment, and inflation. The outlook for these variables also matters a great deal to businesses and financial market participants. The authors present a factor-augmented Bayesian vector autoregressive forecasting model that significantly outperforms both a benchmark random walk model and a pure time-series model. They then use these factors in an ordered probit model to develop the probability distribution over a 12-month horizon. One distribution assesses the ...
Working Paper
A High-Frequency Measure of Income Inequality
To identify shocks in VARs using short-run sign or exclusion restrictions, the highest-frequency data possible is usually preferred. For income inequality, there is tension between high frequency and high quality. Annual datasets that survey large numbers of people provide high-quality estimates of income. Higher frequency surveys generally provide a sparser sampling of individual income. Some previous studies have used the the higher frequency data, presumably to match the frequency necessary to identify the shock. Using data obtained from the higher frequency, lower respondant surveys might ...
Working Paper
Measuring The Effect of Shocks on Inequality: It's All About the Data
To identify shocks in VARs using short-run sign or exclusion restrictions, the highest frequency data possible is usually preferred. For income inequality, there is tension between high frequency and high quality. Annual datasets that survey large numbers of people provide high-quality estimates of income. Higher frequency surveys generally provide a sparser sampling of individual income. Some previous studies have used the higher frequency data, presumably to match the frequency necessary to identify the shock. Using data obtained from the higher frequency, lower respondent surveys might ...
Working Paper
Tax Progressivity, Economic Booms, and Trickle-Up Economics
We propose a method to decompose changes in the tax structure into orthogonal components measuring the level and progressivity of taxes. Similar to tax shocks found in the existing empirical literature, the level shock is contractionary. The tax progressivity shock is expansionary: Increasing tax progressivity raises (lowers) disposable income at the bottom (top) end of the income distribution by shifting the tax burden from the bottom to the top. If agents' marginal propensity to consume falls with income, the rise in consumption at the bottom more than compensates for the decline in ...
Working Paper
Tax Progressivity, Economic Booms, and Trickle-Up Economics
We propose a method to decompose changes in the tax structure into a component measuring the level of taxes and a component orthogonal to the level that measures progressivity. While our focus is on the progessivity results, we find that the level shock is similar to standard tax shocks found in the empirical literature in that a rise in the level is contractionary. An increase in tax progressivity sets off an economic boom. Those at the bottom of the income distribution (who are constrained hand-to-mouth consumers) set off a consumption boom that expands the overall economy. Those at the top ...
Working Paper
Tax Progressivity, Economic Booms, and Trickle-Up Economics
We propose a method to decompose changes in the tax structure into orthogonal components measuring the level and progressivity of taxes. While our focus is on the progessivity results, we find that the level shock is similar to standard tax shocks found in the empirical literature in that a rise in the level is contractionary. We find that an increase in tax progressivity sets off an economic boom. When tax progressivity increases, those at the bottom of the income distribution experience an increase in disposable income; these consumers have a high marginal propensity to consume, and this ...