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Briefing
Does Redistribution Increase Output?
According to conventional wisdom, wealth redistribution boosts output by increasing aggregate consumption. However, while redistributive policies can have a short-run stimulative effect on consumption, their effect on output depends, potentially quite importantly, on the nature of household labor supply.
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.
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
Trade-offs in Fulfilling the Fed’s Dual Mandate
This article discusses the trade-offs and impacts of inflationary environments given the dual mandate of the Federal Reserve. High inflation creates pricing distortions and leads to a tax on liquidity. Furthermore, it has direct redistributive impacts of inflation on wages, portfolios and contracts that are preset in dollar terms. The analysis concludes that while inflationary trade-offs are complex, keeping expectations anchored is a paramount objective for the Fed, since unanchored expectations make all the other trade-offs harder to navigate.
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.
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
When do credit frictions matter for business cycles?
Since the Great Recession there has been renewed interest in introducing credit frictions in business cycle models. However, in order for credit frictions to be quantitatively meaningful and qualitatively realistic in business cycles, it is necessary to depart from conventional assumptions about production technology or preferences and/or add additional frictions. This article reviews some of those departures and additions.
Working Paper
Multilateral Comovement in a New Keynesian World: A Little Trade Goes a Long Way
We study how international linkages and nominal price rigidities jointly shape the dynamics of inflation and output across multiple large economies. We describe how these features produce a global system of Phillips curves explicitly connected by multilateral trade relationships. In equilibrium, disturbances abroad propagate to domestic variables not only directly, through pairwise trade between countries, but also indirectly through third-country effects arising from the network structure of trade. The combined propagation mechanisms imply that country-specific shocks alone explain almost 90 ...
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 ...
Working Paper
The Persistent Employment Effects of the 2006-09 U.S. Housing Wealth Collapse
We show that the housing wealth collapse of 2006-09 had a persistent impact on employment across counties in the U.S. In particular, localities that had a larger loss in housing net worth during that period had more depressed employment as late as 2016, without a commensurate population response. The use of IV's and controls to identify the causal impact of the wealth shock amplifies those results, leading to an estimate that a 10 percent change in housing net worth between 2006 and 2009 causes a 4.5 percent decline in local employment by 2016, as compared with a 2006 baseline. We do not find ...