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Working Paper
Pandemic-Era Uncertainty on Main Street and Wall Street
We draw on the monthly Survey of Business Uncertainty (SBU) to make three observations about pandemic-era uncertainty in the U.S. economy. First, equity market traders and executives of nonfinancial firms share similar assessments about uncertainty at one-year lookahead horizons. That is, the one-year VIX has moved similarly to our survey-based measure of (average) firm-level subjective uncertainty at one-year forecast horizons. Second, looking within the distribution of beliefs in the SBU reveals that firm-level expectations shifted towards upside risk in the latter part of 2020. In this ...
Working Paper
It’s not just for inflation: The usefulness of the median CPI in BVAR forecasting
In this paper we investigate the forecasting performance of the median CPI in a variety of Bayesian VARs (BVARs) that are often used for monetary policy. Until now, the use of trimmed-mean price statistics in forecasting inflation has often been relegated to simple univariate or ?Philips-Curve? approaches, thus limiting their usefulness in applications that require consistent forecasts of multiple macro variables. We find that inclusion of an extreme trimmed-mean measure?the median CPI?significantly improves the forecasts of both headline and core CPI. across our wide-ranging set of BVARs. ...
Firms Expect Working from Home to Triple
The coronavirus and efforts to mitigate its impact are having a transformative impact on many aspects of economic life, intensifying trends like shopping online rather than visiting brick-and-mortar stores and increasing the incidence of working from home. Indeed, many tech giants have already made working from home a permanent option for employees.
Journal Article
Forecasting inflation? Target the middle
The Median CPI is well-known as an accurate predictor of future infl ation. But it?s just one of many possible trimmed-mean inflation measures. Recent research compares these types of measures to see which tracks future inflation best. Not only does the Median CPI outperform other trims in predicting CPI inflation, it also does a better job of predicting PCE inflation, the FOMC?s preferred measure, than the core PCE.
Working Paper
Trimmed-Mean Inflation Statistics: Just Hit the One in the Middle
This paper reinvestigates the performance of trimmed-mean inflation measures some 20 years since their inception, asking whether there is a particular trimmed-mean measure that dominates the median consumer price index (CPI). Unlike previous research, we evaluate the performance of symmetric and asymmetric trimmed means using a well known equality of prediction test. We find that there is a large swath of trimmed means that have statistically indistinguishable performance. Also, although the swath of statistically similar trims changes slightly over different sample periods, it always ...
Working Paper
Unit Cost Expectations and Uncertainty: Firms' Perspectives on Inflation
We propose a novel, survey-based measure of nominal marginal cost expectations held by business decision makers to track building inflationary pressures and augment the existing set of inflation expectations data policymakers frequently monitor. Unlike other surveys of firms or households that elicit "aggregate" expectations, we focus on idiosyncratic costs that firms are well-aware of and plan for, and which matter for price setting. We document five key findings. First, once aggregated, firms' unit cost realizations closely comove with US inflation statistics. Second, in aggregate, firms' ...
Working Paper
Trimmed-mean inflation statistics: just hit the one in the middle
This paper reinvestigates the performance of trimmed-mean inflation measures some 20 years since their inception, asking whether there is a particular trimmed mean measure that dominates the median CPI. Unlike previous research, we evaluate the performance of symmetric and asymmetric trimmed-means using a well-known equality of prediction test. We fi nd that there is a large swath of trimmed-means that have statistically indistinguishable performance. Also, while the swath of statistically similar trims changes slightly over different sample periods, it always includes the median CPI?an ...
Working Paper
Estimates of Cost-Price Passthrough from Business Survey Data
We examine businesses' price-setting practices via open-ended interviews and in a quantitative survey module with business contacts from the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta, Cleveland, and New York in December 2022 and January 2023. Businesses indicated that their prices were strongly influenced by demand, a desire to maintain steady profit margins, and wages and labor costs. Survey respondents expected reduced growth in costs and prices of about 5 percent on average over the next year. Backward-looking, forward-looking, and hypothetical scenarios reveal average cost-price passthrough of ...
Journal Article
Are some prices in the CPI more forward looking than others? We think so
Some of the items that make up the Consumer Price Index change prices frequently, while others are slow to change. We explore whether these two sets of prices - sticky and flexible - provide insight on different aspects of the inflation process. We find that sticky prices appear to incorporate expectations about future inflation to a greater degree than prices that change on a frequent basis, while flexible prices respond more powerfully to economic conditions?economic slack. Importantly, our sticky-price measure seems to contain a component of inflation expectations, and that component may ...
Journal Article
Simple ways to forecast inflation: what works best?
There are many ways to forecast the future rate of inflation, ranging from sophisticated statistical models involving hundreds of variables to hunches based on past experience. We generate a number of forecasts using a simple statistical model and an even simpler estimating rule, adding in various measures thought to be helpful in predicting the course of inflation. Then we compare their forecast accuracy. We find that no single specification outperforms all others over all time periods. For example, the median and 16 percent trimmed-mean measures outperform all other specifications during ...