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Report
The Drivers of Inflation Dynamics during the Pandemic: (Early) Evidence from Disaggregated Consumption Data
What explains inflation dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic? This brief focuses on the relative roles of demand and supply factors. Prices and quantities of consumed goods and services are positively correlated following demand changes and negatively correlated in response to supply disturbances. Employing disaggregated indexes from personal consumption expenditures data, this brief documents a positive relationship between prices and quantities during the early stages of the pandemic, followed by a negative relationship in the later period. Thus, while the short deflation episode in March ...
Report
Have US Households Depleted All the Excess Savings They Accumulated during the Pandemic?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, US households accumulated a historically high volume of personal savings. As the crisis waned, personal savings started to decline. Economists disagree on whether households have drained their excess savings, and they disagree on which income group is more likely to have done so. The lack of consensus stems from different assumptions about today’s long-term saving rate, which is used as a benchmark to define excess savings. If households need to set aside a higher share of their income now relative to before the pandemic, then pandemic-era excess savings have ...
Report
Manufacturing Gains from Green Energy and Semiconductor Spending since the CHIPS and Inflation Reduction Acts
Real investment—spending (net of inflation) on nonresidential construction, manufacturing equipment, and intellectual property products (IPP)—in the United States has grown substantially over the last few years despite the high-interest-rate environment that emerged in 2022 and is only now beginning to subside. The current strength of investment is important to policymakers because its sensitivity to interest rates makes it a key channel through which monetary policy is transmitted into the economy and because real private domestic investment constitutes 15 percent of US real GDP.
Working Paper
Forecasting GDP Growth with NIPA Aggregates
Beyond GDP, which is measured using expenditure data, the U.S. national income and product accounts (NIPAs) provide an income-based measure of the economy (gross domestic income, or GDI), a measure that averages GDP and GDI, and various aggregates that include combinations of GDP components. This paper compiles real-time data on a variety of NIPA aggregates and uses these in simple time-series models to construct out-of-sample forecasts for GDP growth. Over short forecast horizons, NIPA aggregates?particularly consumption and GDP less inventories and trade?together with these simple ...
Working Paper
Communicating Data Uncertainty: Multi-Wave Experimental Evidence for UK GDP
Economic statistics are commonly published without estimates of their uncertainty. We conduct two waves of a randomized controlled online experiment to assess if and how the UK public understands data uncertainty. A control group observes only the point estimate of GDP. Treatment groups are presented with alternative qualitative and quantitative communications of GDP data uncertainty. We find that most of the public understands that GDP numbers are uncertain. Quantitative communications of data uncertainty help align the public’s subjective probabilistic expectations of data uncertainty ...
Working Paper
Communicating Data Uncertainty: Multi-Wave Experimental Evidence for UK GDP
Economic statistics are commonly published without any explicit indication of their uncertainty. To assess if and how the UK public interprets and understands data uncertainty, we conduct two waves of a randomized controlled online experiment. A control group is presented with the headline point estimate of GDP, as emphasized by the statistical office. Treatment groups are then presented with alternative qualitative and quantitative communications of GDP data uncertainty. We find that most of the public understands that uncertainty is inherent in official GDP numbers. But communicating ...
Working Paper
Reconciled Estimates of Monthly GDP in the US
In the US, income and expenditure-side estimates of GDP (GDPI and GDPE) measure "true" GDP with error and are available at a quarterly frequency. Methods exist for using these proxies to produce reconciled quarterly estimates of true GDP. In this paper, we extend these methods to provide reconciled historical true GDP estimates at a monthly frequency. We do this using a Bayesian mixed frequency vector autoregression (MF-VAR) involving GDPE, GDPI, unobserved true GDP, and monthly indicators of short-term economic activity. Our MF-VAR imposes restrictions that reflect a measurement-error ...
Working Paper
Are Revisions to State-Level GDP Data in the US Well Behaved?
No, first estimates of state GDP growth are not rational forecasts, except for Georgia. Revisions to first estimates of state-level GDP growth tend to be biased, large, and/or predictable using information known at the time of the first estimate.
Discussion Paper
Estimating the output gap in real time
I propose a novel method of estimating the potential level of U.S. GDP in real time. The proposed wage-based measure of economic potential remains virtually unchanged when new data are released. The distance between current and potential output ? the output gap ? satisfies Okun?s law and outperforms many other measures of slack in forecasting inflation. Thus, I provide a robust statistical tool useful for understanding current economic conditions and guiding policymaking.
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 ...