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Author:Meyer, Brent 

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.
Macroblog

Working Paper
The Shift to Remote Work Lessens Wage-Growth Pressures

The recent shift to remote work raised the amenity value of employment. As compensation adjusts to share the amenity-value gains with employers, wage-growth pressures moderate. We find empirical support for this mechanism in the wage-setting behavior of US employers, and we develop novel survey data to quantify its force. Our data imply a cumulative wage-growth moderation of 2.0 percentage points over two years. This moderation offsets more than half the real-wage catchup effect that Blanchard (2022) highlights in his analysis of near-term inflation pressures. The amenity-values gains ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2022-7

Working Paper
Economic Uncertainty before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic

We consider several economic uncertainty indicators for the United States and the UK before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: implied stock market volatility, newspaper-based economic policy uncertainty, twitter chatter about economic uncertainty, subjective uncertainty about future business growth, and disagreement among professional forecasters about future gross domestic product growth. Three results emerge. First, all indicators show huge uncertainty jumps in reaction to the pandemic and its economic fallout. Indeed, most indicators reach their highest values on record. Second, peak ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2020-9

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 Papers (Old Series) , Paper 1217

Discussion Paper
How Do Firms Adjust Prices in a High Inflation Environment?

How do firms set prices? What factors do they consider, and to what extent are cost increases passed through to prices? While these are important questions in general, they become even more salient during periods of high inflation. In this blog post, we highlight preliminary results from ongoing research on firms’ price-setting behavior, a joint project between researchers at the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta, Cleveland, and New York. We use a combination of open-ended interviews and a quantitative survey in our analysis. Firms reported that the strength of demand was the most important ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20230602

Working Paper
Lessons for forecasting unemployment in the United States: use flow rates, mind the trend

This paper evaluates the ability of autoregressive models, professional forecasters, and models that incorporate unemployment flows to forecast the unemployment rate. We pay particular attention to flows-based approaches?the more reduced-form approach of Barnichon and Nekarda (2012) and the more structural method in Tasci (2012)?to generalize whether data on unemployment flows are useful in forecasting the unemployment rate. We find that any approach that considers unemployment inflow and outflow rates performs well in the near term. Over longer forecast horizons, Tasci (2012) appears to be a ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2015-1

Working Paper
Surveying Business Uncertainty

We elicit subjective probability distributions from business executives about their own-firm outcomes at a one-year look-ahead horizon. In terms of question design, our key innovation is to let survey respondents freely select support points and probabilities in five-point distributions over future sales growth, employment, and investment. In terms of data collection, we develop and field a new monthly panel Survey of Business Uncertainty (SBU). The SBU began in 2014 and now covers about 1,750 firms drawn from all 50 states, every major nonfarm industry, and a range of firm sizes. We find ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2019-13

Working Paper
The inflation expectations of firms: what do they look like, are they accurate, and do they matter?

The purpose of this paper is to answer the three questions in the title. Using a large monthly survey of businesses, we investigate the inflation expectations and uncertainties of firms. We document that, in the aggregate, firm inflation expectations are very similar to the predictions of professional forecasters for national inflation statistics, despite a somewhat greater heterogeneity of expectations that we attribute to the idiosyncratic cost structure firms face. We also show that firm inflation expectations bear little in common with the "prices in general" expectations reported by ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2014-27

Working Paper
The Usefulness of the Median CPI in Bayesian VARs Used for Macroeconomic Forecasting and Policy

In this paper we investigate the forecasting performance of the median Consumer Price Index (CPI) in a variety of Bayesian vector autoregressions (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 Phillips 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?improves the forecasts of both core and headline inflation (CPI and ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2016-13

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 ...
Working Papers , Paper 23-14

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