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Working Paper
The Disappointing Recovery of Output after 2009
U.S. output has expanded only slowly since the recession trough in 2009, even though the unemployment rate has essentially returned to a precrisis, normal level. We use a growth-accounting decomposition to explore explanations for the output shortfall, giving full treatment to cyclical effects that, given the depth of the recession, should have implied unusually fast growth. We find that the growth shortfall has almost entirely reflected two factors: the slow growth of total factor productivity, and the decline in labor force participation. Both factors reflect powerful adverse forces that ...
Conference Paper
Forecasting output and inflation: the role of asset prices
This paper examines old and new evidence on the predictive performance of asset prices for inflation and real output growth. We first review the large literature on this topic, focusing on the past dozen years. We then undertake an empirical analysis of quarterly date on up to 38 candidate indicators (mainly asset prices) for seven OECD countries for a span of up to 41 years (1959 - 1999). The conclusions from the literature review and the empirical analysis are the same. Some asset prices predict either inflation or output growth in some countries in some periods. Which series predicts what, ...
Journal Article
The Disappointing Recovery in U.S. Output after 2009
U.S. output has expanded only slowly since the recession trough in 2009, counter to normal expectations of a rapid cyclical recovery. Removing cyclical effects reveals that the deep recession was superimposed on a sharply slowing trend in underlying growth. The slowing trend reflects two factors: slow growth of innovation and declining labor force participation. Both of these powerful adverse forces were in place before the recession and, thus, were not the result of the financial crisis or policy changes since 2009.
Working Paper
Stochastic trends and economic fluctuations
Report
Measuring Real Activity Using a Weekly Economic Index
This paper describes a weekly economic index (WEI) developed to track the rapid economic developments associated with the onset of and policy response to the novel coronavirus in the United States. The WEI is a weekly composite index of real economic activity, with eight of ten series available the Thursday after the end of the reference week. In addition to being a weekly real activity index, the WEI has strong predictive power for output measures and provided an accurate nowcast of current-quarter GDP growth in the first half of 2020. We document how the WEI responded to key events and data ...
Working Paper
A state-dependent model for inflation forecasting
We develop a parsimonious bivariate model of inflation and unemployment that allows for persistent variation in trend inflation and the NAIRU. The model, which consists of five unobserved components (including the trends) with stochastic volatility, implies a time-varying VAR for changes in the rates of inflation and unemployment. The implied backwards-looking Phillips curve has a time-varying slope that is steeper in the 1970s than in the 1990s. Pseudo out-of-sample forecasting experiments indicate improvements upon univariate benchmarks. Since 2008, the implied Phillips curve has become ...
Working Paper
Measuring Real Activity Using a Weekly Economic Index
This paper describes a weekly economic index (WEI) developed to track the rapid economic developments associated with the onset of and policy response to the novel coronavirus in the United States. The WEI is a weekly composite index of real economic activity, with eight of 10 series available the Thursday after the end of the reference week. In addition to being a weekly real activity index, the WEI has strong predictive power for output measures and provided an accurate nowcast of current-quarter GDP growth in the first half of 2020, with weaker performance in the second half. We document ...
Conference Paper
Has inflation become harder to forecast?
Conference Paper
Phillips curve inflation forecasts
This paper surveys the literature since 1993 on pseudo out-of-sample evaluation of inflation forecasts in the United States and conducts an extensive empirical analysis that recapitulates and clarifies this literature using a consistent data set and methodology. The literature review and empirical results are gloomy and indicate that Phillips curve forecasts (broadly interpreted as forecasts using an activity variable) are better than other multivariate forecasts, but their performance is episodic, sometimes better than and sometimes worse than a good (not nave) univariate benchmark. The ...