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Working Paper
Wage gains among job changers across the business cycle: insight from state administrative data
This paper uses unique employer-employee matched administrative data files to determine that firm and industry employment dynamics play significant roles in the earnings gains of workers who change jobs and in different ways across the business cycle. Among the more notable results is the finding that job-changers who leave a firm that is shutting down experience a greater earnings loss than job-changers who leave a firm that is merely contracting. In addition, the earnings loss from changing industries where firm-specific human capital is likely to be important has the potential of creating ...
Journal Article
Living in an 800 MHz economy
Journal Article
Central bank forecasting: an international comparison
Forecasts, whether explicit or implicit, are at the heart of policy making. In considering forecasting for monetary policy, this article contrasts the forecasting processes at three central banks-the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Bank of England, and the U.S. Federal Reserve. ; In the United States policymakers consider confidential staff forecasts in policy discussions, but these do not necessarily represent the consensus forecasts of the policy committee. At the Bank of England, official published forecasts are the product of bank staff and the policy committee working closely together, ...
Journal Article
Figuring out the oil price puzzle
Journal Article
Now and then: How different downturns affect the Southeast service sector
The service sector has performed very differently in the recession that began in March 2001 than it did in the July 1990-March 1991 recession. Many service industries have performed poorly in the most recent downturn, demonstrating that the service sector may be less immune to negative economic shocks than is commonly assumed.
Journal Article
Outlook mixed for Southeast and nation in 2003
Journal Article
Vector autoregressions: forecasting and reality
Constructing forecasts of the future path for economic series such as real gross domestic product growth, inflation, and unemployment forms a large part of applied economic analysis for business and government. Model-based forecasts are easier to replicate and validate by independent researchers than forecasts based on expert opinion alone. In addition, the forecaster can formally investigate the source of systematic errors in model forecasts, and a forecast model s performance can be established before it is used by a decision maker. ; The authors of this article describe a particular ...
Journal Article
It's who you are and what you do: explaining the IT industry wage premium
The information technology (IT) boom dramatically boosted the rapid growth of the U.S. economy during the 1990s, contributing 1.4 percentage points of the 4.6 percent national average real gross domestic product growth from 1996 to 2000. As the IT boom went bust in 2001, however, the IT sector?s influence on the economy dwindled. ; But a lingering effect of the IT boom may still be apparent in the wages of IT workers. This article explores the extent to which variations in wages between IT-producing and non-IT industries can be accounted for by differences in wages paid to IT-related ...
Working Paper
Improving forecasts of the federal funds rate in a policy model
Vector autoregression (VAR) models are widely used for policy analysis. Some authors caution, however, that the forecast errors of the federal funds rate from such a VAR are large compared to those from the federal funds futures market. From these findings, it is argued that the inaccurate federal funds rate forecasts from VARs limit their usefulness as a tool for guiding policy decisions. In this paper, we demonstrate that the poor forecast performance is largely eliminated if a Bayesian estimation technique is used instead of OLS. In particular, using two different data sets we show that ...