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Working Paper
News and Uncertainty about COVID-19: Survey Evidence and Short-Run Economic Impact
A tailor-made survey documents consumer perceptions of the U.S. economy’s response to a large shock: the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey ran at a daily frequency between March 2020 and July 2021. Consumer perceptions regarding output and inflation react rapidly. Uncertainty is pervasive. A business-cycle model calibrated to the consumer views provides an interpretation. The rise in household uncertainty amplifies the pandemic recession by a factor of three. Different perceptions about monetary policy can explain why consumers and professional forecasters agree on the ...
Journal Article
Consumers and COVID-19: A Real-Time Survey
We summarize the results from an ongoing survey that asks consumers questions related to the recent coronavirus outbreak, including their expectations for how the economy is likely to be affected by the outbreak and how their own behavior has changed in response to it. The survey began in early March, providing a window into how consumers’ responses have evolved in real time since the early days of the acknowledged spread of COVID-19 in the United States. In updating and charting the survey’s findings on the Cleveland Fed’s website going forward, we seek to inform policymakers and ...
Working Paper
The Expectations of Others
Based on a framework of memory and recall that accounts for social networks, we provide conditions under which social networks can amplify expectations. We provide evidence for several predictions of the model using a novel dataset on inflation expectations and social network connections: Inflation expectations in the social network are statistically significantly, positively associated with individual inflation expectations; the relationship is stronger for groups that share common demographic characteristics, such as gender, income, or political affiliation. An instrumental variable ...
Working Paper
Financial Heterogeneity and Monetary Union
We analyze the economic consequences of forming a monetary union among countries with varying degrees of financial distortions, which interact with the firms' pricing decisions because of customer-market considerations. In response to a financial shock, firms in financially weak countries (the periphery) maintain{{p}}cashflows by raising markups--in both domestic and export markets--while firms in financially strong countries (the core) reduce markups, undercutting their financially constrained competitors to gain market share. When the two regions are experiencing different shocks, common ...
Working Paper
The Propagation of Monetary Policy Shocks in a Heterogeneous Production Economy
Realistic heterogeneity in price rigidity interacts with heterogeneity in sectoral size and input-output linkages in the transmission of monetary policy shocks. Quantitatively, heterogeneity in price stickiness is the central driver for real effects. Input-output linkages and consumption shares alter the identity of the most important sectors to the transmission. Reducing the number of sectors decreases monetary non-neutrality with a similar impact response of inflation. Hence, the initial response of inflation to monetary shocks is not sufficient to discriminate across models and ignoring ...
Journal Article
Indirect Consumer Inflation Expectations
Surveys often measure consumers’ inflation expectations by asking directly about prices in general or overall inflation, concepts that may not be well-defined for some individuals. In this Commentary, we propose a new, indirect way of measuring consumer inflation expectations: Given consumers’ expectations about developments in prices of goods and services during the next 12 months, we ask them how their incomes would have to change to make them equally well-off relative to their current situation such that they could buy the same amount of goods and services as they can today. Using a ...
Working Paper
Greater Than the Sum of the Parts: Aggregate vs. Aggregated Inflation Expectations
Using novel survey evidence on consumer inflation expectations disaggregated by personal consumption expenditure (PCE) categories, we document the paradox that consumers' aggregate inflation expectations usually exceed any individual category expectation. We explore procedures for aggregating category inflation expectations, and find that the inconsistency between aggregate and aggregated inflation expectations rises with subjective uncertainty and is systematically related to socioeconomic characteristics. Overall, our results are inconsistent with the notion that consumers' aggregate ...
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 Paper
Big G
“Big G” typically refers to aggregate government spending on a homogeneous good. In this paper, we open up this construct by analyzing the entire universe of procurement contracts of the US government and establish five facts. First, government spending is granular; that is, it is concentrated in relatively few firms and sectors. Second, relative to private expenditures its composition is biased. Third, procurement contracts are short-lived. Fourth, idiosyncratic variation dominates the fluctuation in spending. Last, government spending is concentrated in sectors with relatively sticky ...
Working Paper
Inflation Dynamics During the Financial Crisis
Firms with limited internal liquidity significantly increased prices in 2008, while their liquidity unconstrained counterparts slashed prices. Differences in the firms' price-setting behavior were concentrated in sectors likely characterized by customer markets. We develop a model, in which firms face financial frictions, while setting prices in a customer-markets setting. Financial distortions create an incentive for firms to raise prices in response to adverse demand or financial shocks. These results reflect the firms' reaction to preserve internal liquidity and avoid accessing external ...