Search Results
Journal Article
Financing of business expansion
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
Spurious seasonal patterns and excess smoothness in the BLS local area unemployment
State level unemployment statistics are some of the most important and widely used data sources for local analysts and public officials to gauge the health of their state?s economy. We find statistically significant seasonal patterns in the state level seasonally adjusted Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS) released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). We find that the pro-rata factors used in the benchmarking process can invoke spurious seasonal patterns in this data. We also find that the Henderson 13 filter used by the BLS to smooth the seasonally adjusted data may reduce ...
Journal Article
Location dynamics: a key consideration for urban policy
What determines where businesses and households locate? Location decisions can affect the economic health of cities and metropolitan areas. But as Jeffrey Brinkman explains, how firms, residents, and workers go about choosing where to locate can involve complex interactions with sometimes unpredictable consequences.
Discussion Paper
April Update: The Coronavirus and Firms in the Fifth Dis
Over the past several weeks, social distancing and shutdowns have impacted our economy. Fifth District firms continued to tell us how COVID-19 has affected their business operations in recent surveys.
Working Paper
Fiscal multipliers under an interest rate peg of deterministic vs. stochastic duration
This paper revisits the size of the fiscal multiplier. The experiment is a fiscal expansion under the assumption of a pegged nominal rate of interest. We demonstrate that a quantitatively important issue is the articulation of the exit from the policy experiment. If the monetary-fiscal expansion is stochastic with a mean duration of T periods, the fiscal multiplier can be unboundedly large. However, if the monetary-fiscal expansion is for a fixed T periods, the multiplier is much smaller. Our explanation rests on a Jensen?s inequality type argument: the deterministic multiplier is convex in ...
Journal Article
The size and growth of businesses started during the financial crisis
Firms started during recessions, especially those started in 2008, have grown less during the first 3 years of their life than those started in non-recession years.
Working Paper
Fiscal multipliers under an interest rate peg of deterministic vs. stochastic duration
This paper revisits the size of the fiscal multiplier. The experiment is a fiscal expansion under the assumption of a pegged nominal rate of interest. We demonstrate that a quantitatively important issue is the articulation of the exit from the policy experiment. If the monetary-fiscal expansion is stochastic with a mean duration of T periods, the fiscal multiplier can be unboundedly large. However, if the monetary-fiscal expansion is for a fixed T periods, the multiplier is much smaller.
Journal Article
Recent developments in business financing
Journal Article
Goldilocks in the corner office
The proper level of CEO compensation is more complicated than some normative sense of what the public considers fair. But with CEO pay regularly reaching eight, even nine figures, could current levels possibly be efficient? Economists can make a good theoretical case that CEO pay is inefficient, but they've had trouble pinpointing the systematic rent (pay in excess of fair market value) being extracted by CEOs. While it might not lower CEO pay, better corporate governance is likely the key to ensuring that it is tied tightly to firm performance.