Search Results
Journal Article
Tracking productivity in real time
Because volatile short-term movements in productivity growth obscure the underlying trend, shifts in this trend may go unrecognized for years - a lag that can lead to policy mistakes and hence economic instability. This study develops a model for tracking productivity that brings in additional variables to help reveal the trend. The model's success is evident in its ability to detect changes in trend productivity within a year or two of their occurrence. Currently, the model indicates that the underlying trend remains strong despite recent weak productivity data.
Journal Article
Introduction
This volume of the Economic Policy Review, "Special issue on the economic effects of September 11," explores some of the key economic consequences of the attacks of September 11. The six articles that make up the volume address several important questions: how great were the losses in New York City on September 11 and in the difficult months thereafter? How much will the nation spend to prevent future attacks? Did the destruction of information and infrastructure impair the functioning of the payments and securities settlement systems, and what steps minimize further damage? Will these ...
Report
What inventory behavior tells us about business cycles
Manufacturers' finished goods inventories are less cyclical than shipments. This requires marginal cost to be more procyclical than is conventionally measured. In this paper, alternative marginal cost measures for six manufacturing industries are constructed. These measures, which attribute high-frequency productivity shocks to procyclical work effort, are more successful in accounting for inventory behavior. Evidence is also provided that the short-run slope of marginal cost arising from convexity of the production function is close to zero for five of the six industries. The paper concludes ...
Conference Paper
Pricing bank loans
Conference Paper
Macroeconomic implications of changes in micro volatility
We review evidence on the Great Moderation in conjunction with evidence about volatility trends at the micro level. We combine the two types of evidence to develop a tentative story for important components of the aggregate volatility decline and its consequences. The key ingredients of the story are declines in firm-level volatility and aggregate volatility ? most dramatically in the durable goods sector ? but the absence of a decline in the volatility of household consumption and individual earnings. Our explanation for volatility reduction stresses improved supply chain management, ...
Report
Exchange rate pass-through, markups, and inventories
A large body of research has established that exporters do not fully adjust their prices across countries in response to exchange rate movements, but instead allow their markups to vary. But while markups are difficult to observe directly, we show in this paper that inventory-sales ratios provide an observable counterpart. We then find evidence that inventory-sales ratios of imported vehicles respond to exchange rate movements to a degree consistent with pass-through on the order of 50 to 75 percent, on the high end of the range found in the literature.
Journal Article
Explaining the gap between new home sales and inventories
For much of the last four decades, the stock of unsold new homes has tracked sales very closely. Since 1995, however, inventories have fallen far behind rapidly advancing sales. What accounts for the change? Market trends have both reduced the need for inventories and slowed the response of inventories to shifts in demand. At the same time, the long current expansion has strained the resources of the building industry, creating supply shortages and raising costs.
Report
Skilled labor -- augmenting technical progress in U.S. manufacturing
This paper examines the role of skilled labor in the growth of total factor productivity. We use panel data from manufacturing industries within the United States to assess the extent to which productivity growth in yearly cross-sections of U.S. manufacturing industries is tied to industry shares of skilled labor inputs. We find evidence of an explosion in skilled-labor augmenting technological progress during the period from approximately 1972 to 1981, which precedes a period of suddenly increasing wage inequality and rapid growth in the relative wages of educated and experienced workers. We ...
Conference Paper
Tracking the new economy: using growth theory to detect changes in trend productivity
The acceleration of productivity since 1995 has prompted a debate over whether the economy's underlying growth rate will remain high. In this paper, we draw on growth theory to identify variables other than productivity - namely consumption and labor compensation - to help estimate trend productivity growth. We treat that trend as a common factor with two "regimes" high-growth and low-growth. Our analysis picks up striking evidence of a switch in the mid-1990s to a higher long-term growth regime, as well as a switch in the early 1970s in the other direction. In addition, we find that ...
Report
The production impact of "cash-for-clunkers": implications for stabilization policy
Stabilization policies frequently aim to boost spending as a means to increase GDP. Spending does not necessarily translate into production, however, especially when inventories are involved. We look at the ?cash-for-clunkers? program that helped finance the purchase of nearly 700,000 vehicles in 2009. An analysis of auto sales and production movements reveals that the program did prompt a large spike in sales. But the program had only a modest and fleeting impact on production, as inventories buffered the movements in sales. These findings suggest caution in judging the efficacy of such ...