Search Results
Journal Article
The role of savings and investment in balancing the current account: some empirical evidence from the United States
Current account deficits ultimately reflect a disparity between a country's national savings and investment. As such, the issue of how current account balance is achieved in practice can be viewed in terms of whether it is savings or investment that adjusts to an external deficit. In this article, the author examines empirically how savings and investment have responded to current account imbalances in the United States over the past 40 years. The main finding is that, on average, investment was largely responsible for rebalancing the current account in the long run. The finding that ...
Briefing
The role of expectations and output in the inflation process: an empirical assessment
This brief examines two issues of current interest concerning inflation: (1) whether "well-anchored" expectations will help to restrain inflation's decline and whether an "un-anchoring" of expectations could lead to undesirably high inflation and (2) to what extent output (or utilization) gaps are useful components of empirical models of inflation and, if they are useful, to what extent current gaps might counterbalance the effect of expectations on inflation. The goals of conducting this examination are to articulate a reasonably coherent framework for the discussion, highlight the ...
Working Paper
Empirical estimates of changing inflation dynamics
This paper provides an array of empirical evidence bearing on potentially important changes in the dynamics of U.S. inflation. We examine the overall performance of Phillips curves relative to some well-known benchmarks, the efficiency with which the Federal Reserve's Greenbook forecasts of inflation use real activity information, and shifts in the key determinants of the reduced-form "triangle model" of inflation. We develop a structural model-based interpretation of observed reduced-form shifts and conduct a reduced-form assessment of the relationship between core and headline measures of ...
Journal Article
Inside and outside bounds: threshold estimates of the Phillips curve
Over the past 30 years, debates about the usefulness of the Phillips curve for explaining inflation have been ongoing. One of the reasons for the recurring debate about the existence of an inflation and unemployment tradeoff is that there have been several instances when large movements in the unemployment rate have elicited little response in the inflation rate. In principle, these episodes of horizontal movement are consistent with a Phillips curve relationship; they just require the curve to shift in the same direction as the unemployment rate. Econometric representations of the Phillips ...
Conference Paper
Estimating forward-looking Euler equations with GMM estimators: an optimal-instruments approach
We compare different methods for estimating forwardlooking output and inflation equations and show that weak identification can be an issue in conventional GMM estimation. GMM and maximum likelihood procedures that impose the dynamic constraints implied by the forwardlooking relation on the instruments set are found to be more reliable than conventional GMM. These ?optimal instruments? procedures provide a robust alternative to estimating dynamic macroeconomic relations, and suggest only a limited role for expectational terms.
Conference Paper
Why the interest in reform?
Working Paper
Do real-time Okun's law errors predict GDP data revisions?
Using U.S. real-time data, we show that changes in the unemployment rate unexplained by Okun's Law have significant predictive power for GDP data revisions. A positive (negative) error in Okun's Law in real time implies that GDP will be later revised to show less (more) growth than initially estimated by the statistical agency. The information in Okun's Law errors about the true state of real economic activity also helps to improve GDP forecasts in the near term. Our findings add a new dimension to the interpretation of real-time Okun's Law errors, as they show that these errors can convey ...
Working Paper
Fiscal retrenchment and the level of economic activity
I analyze the effects of an expected future reduction in government spending on the current level of economic activity. In a closed-economy dynamic general equilibrium setup with nominal rigidities, it is shown that expected future cuts in government spending generate an increase in current GDP. Nominal rigidities are an essential feature for the emergence of such a result. With perfect flexible prices but in an otherwise identical setup, an expected future decline in government spending entails no increase in the current level of economic activity.
Report
The Distribution of Sectoral Price Changes and Recent Inflation Developments
Inflation has declined across many sectors so far in 2023, but the distribution of sectoral price changes still shows atypical features, such as bimodality in which substantial masses of sectors record price changes both below and above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent inflation target. Such bimodality was not typical before the pandemic, suggesting that sector-specific price adjustments are now playing a more important role in inflation developments. The recent slowdown in inflation was partly caused by a larger-than-normal share of the consumption basket being located in the left tail of ...
Working Paper
An evaluation of the Federal Reserve estimates of the natural rate of unemployment in real time
The authors derive an estimate of the Federal Reserve's assessment of the natural rate of unemployment in real time from the Greenbook forecast of inflation. The estimated natural rate starts to rise noticeably in the second half of the mid-1970s. It stays relatively high in the 1980s, and then declines noticeably in the second half of the 1990s. They compare the Greenbook estimates with the estimates obtained in real time from simple relationships that extract information about the natural rate of unemployment from the dynamics of inflation, aggregate demand, and the functioning of the labor ...