Journal Article
New Normal or Real-Time Noise? Revisiting the Recent Data on Labor Productivity
Zito, John; Bognanni, Mark (2016-12)
Some economic observers have argued that the weakness of recent productivity data indicates we have entered a new era of low economic growth. To investigate that claim, we study labor productivity between 1968 and 2016 and compare recent productivity growth to its past behavior. We find that though recent productivity data are unambiguously weak, they are not greatly out of line with the variation of productivity over the historical record. We find that when labor productivity has been weak in the past, it did not persist at those levels. In addition, we find a systematic tendency to ...
Economic Commentary , Issue December

Working Paper
Sequential Bayesian Inference for Vector Autoregressions with Stochastic Volatility
Zito, John; Bognanni, Mark (2019-12-16)
We develop a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithm for Bayesian inference in vector autoregressions with stochastic volatility (VAR-SV). The algorithm builds particle approximations to the sequence of the model’s posteriors, adapting the particles from one approximation to the next as the window of available data expands. The parallelizability of the algorithm’s computations allows the adaptations to occur rapidly. Our particular algorithm exploits the ability to marginalize many parameters from the posterior analytically and embeds a known Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for ...
Working Papers , Paper 19-29