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Real Wages Grew During Two Years of COVID-19 After Controlling for Workforce Composition
Howard, Sean; Rich, Robert W.; Tracy, Joseph (2022-02-15)
Despite recent negative real wage growth, workers have experienced real wage gains over the two years of the pandemic.
Dallas Fed Economics

Working Paper
Indirect Consumer Inflation Expectations: Theory and Evidence
Hajdini, Ina; Knotek, Edward S.; Leer, John; Pedemonte, Mathieu; Rich, Robert W.; Schoenle, Raphael (2022-11-22)
Based on indirect utility theory, we introduce a novel methodology of measuring inflation expectations indirectly. This methodology starts at the individual level, asking consumers about the change in income required to buy the same amounts of goods and services one year ahead. Analytically, our methodology possesses smaller ex-post aggregate inflation forecast errors relative to forecasts based on conventional survey questions. We ask this question in a large-scale, high-frequency survey of consumers in the US and 14 countries, and we show that indirect consumer inflation expectations ...
Working Papers , Paper 22-35

Discussion Paper
Consumer Confidence: A Useful Indicator of . . . the Labor Market?
Rich, Robert W.; Bram, Jason; Abel, Joshua (2013-09-04)
Consumer confidence is closely monitored by policymakers and commentators because of the presumed insight it can offer into the outlook for consumer spending and thus the economy in general. Yet there’s another useful dimension to consumer confidence that’s often overlooked: its ability to signal incipient developments in the job market. In this post, we look at trends in a particular measure of consumer confidence—the Present Situation Index component of the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index—over the past thirty-five years and show that they’re closely associated with ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20130904

Report
Early contract renegotiation: An analysis of U.S. labor contracts from 1970 to 1995
Rich, Robert W.; Tracy, Joseph (2011)
This paper examines the ex post flexibility of U.S. labor contracts during the 1970-95 period by investigating whether unanticipated changes in inflation increase the likelihood of a contract being renegotiated prior to its expiration. We find strong empirical support for this hypothesis. Specifically, our results indicate that renegotiations are triggered principally by large and infrequent price shocks of either sign. When combined with evidence that ex ante contract durations are shorter during episodes of increased inflation uncertainty, our results suggest that these contracts are ...
Staff Reports , Paper 521

Discussion Paper
How Do Firms Adjust Prices in a High Inflation Environment?
Bruine de Bruin, Wändi; Dogra, Keshav; Heise, Sebastian; Knotek, Edward S.; Meyer, Brent; Rich, Robert W.; Schoenle, Raphael; Topa, Giorgio; Van der Klaauw, Wilbert (2023-06-02)
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

Conference Paper
Tracking the new economy: using growth theory to detect changes in trend productivity
Rich, Robert W.; Kahn, James A. (2003-11)
The acceleration of productivity since 1995 has prompted a debate over whether the economy's underlying growth rate will remain high. In this paper, we draw on growth theory to identify variables other than productivity - namely consumption and labor compensation - to help estimate trend productivity growth. We treat that trend as a common factor with two "regimes" high-growth and low-growth. Our analysis picks up striking evidence of a switch in the mid-1990s to a higher long-term growth regime, as well as a switch in the early 1970s in the other direction. In addition, we find that ...
Proceedings , Issue Nov

Working Paper
Heterogeneity and the Effects of Aggregation on Wage Growth
Rich, Robert W.; Tracy, Joseph (2022-08-01)
This paper focuses on the implications of alternative methods of aggregating individual wage data for the behavior of economy-wide wage growth. The analysis is motivated by evidence of significant heterogeneity in individual wage growth and its cyclicality. Because of this heterogeneity, the choice of aggregation will affect the properties of economy-wide wage growth measures. To assess the importance of this consideration, we provide a decomposition of wage growth into aggregation effects and composition effects and use the decomposition to compare growth in an average wage—specifically ...
Working Papers , Paper 22-22

Report
Tracking the new economy: using growth theory to detect changes in trend productivity
Kahn, James A.; Rich, Robert W. (2003-01-01)
The acceleration of productivity since 1995 has prompted a debate over whether the economy's underlying growth rate will remain high. In this paper, we propose a methodology for estimating trend growth that draws on growth theory to identify variables other than productivity namely consumption and labor compensation to help estimate trend productivity growth. We treat that trend as a common factor with two "regimes," high-growth and low-growth. Our analysis picks up striking evidence of a switch in the mid-1990s to a higher long-term growth regime, as well as a switch in the early 1970s in ...
Staff Reports , Paper 159

Journal Article
Expanding the Survey of Firms’ Inflation Expectations
Candia, Bernardo; Hajdini, Ina; Knotek, Edward S.; Pfajfar, Damjan; Rich, Robert W. (2026-05-11)
The Survey of Firms’ Inflation Expectations (SoFIE) is a quarterly survey of chief executive officers and other top business executives in the United States that collects information about their inflation expectations. This Economic Commentary presents questions newly introduced to SoFIE—some related to inflation and others examining expectations for prices, costs, employment, and wages—and provides initial analysis of the collected responses. The expanded set of survey results will be updated on a quarterly basis on the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s website at clefed.org/SoFIE.
Economic Commentary , Volume 2026 , Issue 09 , Pages 16

Journal Article
The (Re)Anchoring of US Firms’ Inflation Expectations
Cline, Alexander; Garciga, Christian; Hajdini, Ina; Reinelt, Timo; Rich, Robert W. (2026-05-26)
This Economic Commentary studies the degree of anchoring of US firms’ inflation expectations from 2018 to 2025 by leveraging a novel survey of firms’ medium-term inflation expectations and their subjective perceptions of the Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) inflation objective. We capture unanchoring by measuring disagreement across firms’ expectations and the misalignment between the mean of firms’ expectations and the FOMC’s inflation objective. Based on our measure, the anchoring of firms’ medium-term inflation expectations weakened significantly during the pandemic ...
Economic Commentary , Volume 2026 , Issue 11 , Pages 7

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