Search Results
Briefing
Are Firms Factoring Increasing Inflation Into Their Prices?
While inflation is low and stable, business leaders are well justified in paying little attention to aggregate inflation measures when making their own pricing decisions. In this article, we introduce a new set of quarterly questions in a business survey that help to ascertain the extent to which firms pay more attention to inflation measures as inflation rises. We find that, from July 2021 to January 2022, business leaders not only report paying more attention to aggregate inflation measures, but also report incorporating those measures into their own pricing decisions.
Briefing
Public and Private Debt after the Pandemic and Policy Normalization
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, public debt has increased dramatically and private debt seems likely to increase as well. High indebtedness could influence the effectiveness of monetary policy and lead to political pressure for the Federal Reserve to maintain low interest rates for an extended period of time.
Working Paper
Estimating the Missing Intercept
Cross-sectional data have proven to be increasingly useful for macroeconomic research. However, their use often leads to the 'missing intercept' problem in which aggregate general equilibrium effects and policy responses are absorbed into fixed effects. We present a statistical approach to jointly estimate aggregate and idiosyncratic effects within a panel framework, leveraging identification strategies coming from both cross-sectional or time-series settings. We then apply our methodology to study government spending multipliers (Nakamura and Steinsson, 2014) and wealth effects from stock ...
Working Paper
What Do Sectoral Dynamics Tell Us About the Origins of Business Cycles?
We use economic theory to rank the impact of structural shocks across sectors. This ranking helps us to identify the origins of U.S. business cycles. To do this, we introduce a Hierarchical Vector Auto-Regressive model, encompassing aggregate and sectoral variables. We find that shocks whose impact originate in the "demand" side (monetary, household, and government consumption) account for 43 percent more of the variance of U.S. GDP growth at business cycle frequencies than identified shocks originating in the "supply" side (technology and energy). Furthermore, corporate financial shocks, ...
Briefing
Will COVID-19 Leave Lasting Economic Scars?
Researchers and policymakers are wondering whether the economic losses associated with the COVID-19 pandemic will prove temporary or persistent. Examining the housing crisis of 2006–09 may provide some clues. Despite the fact that the housing crisis represented a temporary demand-side shock, it had lasting negative effects on employment and GDP in regions most exposed to the boom and bust in house prices.
Journal Article
The Heterogeneous Business-Cycle Behavior of Industrial Production
This paper collects stylized facts about the cyclical properties of industry-level data. Those can provide a window into the sources of business cycles as well as propagation mechanisms. We find (i) goods that are more durable or that have higher wealth elasticity are more cyclical, (ii) sectors tied to the government tend to lag business cycles, (iii) sectors with nominal frictions tend to lag business cycles, (iv) sectors in which financial frictions are likely to be important tend to lag business cycles, and (v) industries that are highly integrated tend to lead business cycles.
Working Paper
What Inventory Behavior Tells Us About How Business Cycles Have Changed
Beginning in the mid-1980s, the nature of U.S. business cycles changed in important ways, as made evident by distinctive shifts in the comovement and relative volatilities of key economic aggregates. These include labor productivity, hours, output, and inventories. Unlike the widely documented change in absolute volatility over that period, known as the Great Moderation, these shifts in comovement and relative volatilities persist into the Great Recession. To understand these changes, we exploit the fact that inventory data are informative about sources of business cycles. Specifically, they ...
Discussion Paper
Inflation Expectations of Fifth District Firms
In early 2021, inflation in the U.S. began to climb, with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) peaking at 9 percent on a year-over-year basis in 2022. Since then, inflation has come down considerably. In July 2021, we started to monitor the inflation expectations of respondents to our Fifth District business surveys. We saw expectations rise along with inflation and then start to fall.In the most recent April survey, we find that most firms are following inflation. Firms' expectations for CPI growth in the next year and the next five years have increased again to levels similar to October 2023. ...
Briefing
COVID Transfers Dampening Employment Growth, but Not Necessarily a Bad Thing
Overall employment levels have remained below their pre-pandemic level and are growing only slowly despite rising wages and vacancies. In this Economic Brief, we examine whether historically high government support may have empowered workers to pull back from labor markets. While that support presents a clear benefit to recipients, a simple calculation based on recent estimates indicates that transfers of close to $2 trillion to households approved over the course of 2020 and 2021 implies a reduction of 0.58 percentage points in the employment-to-population ratio.
Briefing
Inflation Expectations and Price Setting Among Fifth District Firms
Evidence from a Federal Reserve Fifth District survey indicates that businesses become more reactive to inflation as it rises, but much of that reactivity reverses as inflation ebbs. Moreover, the survey indicates that inflation expectations matter to how most firms set their prices. How much inflation expectations matter and for whom they matter are essential questions for policymakers as they seek to maintain price stability.