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Working Paper
What makes a job better? Survey evidence from job changers
Changes in pay and benefits alone incorrectly predict self-assessed changes in overall job quality 30 percent of the time, according to survey evidence from job changers. Job changers also place more emphasis on their interest in their work than they do on pay and benefits in evaluating whether their new job is better. Parents particularly emphasize work-life balance, and we find some indications that mothers value it more than fathers. Improvements in pay are highly correlated with improvements in other amenities for workers with less education but not for workers with a bachelor's degree or ...
Working Paper
Does it Pay to Send Multiple Pre-Paid Incentives? Evidence from a Randomized Experiment
To encourage survey participation and improve sample representativeness, the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) offers an unconditional pre-paid monetary incentive and separate post-paid incentive upon survey completion. We conducted a pre-registered between-subject randomized control experiment within the 2022 SCF, with at least 1,200 households per experimental group, to examine whether changing the pre-paid incentive structure affects survey outcomes. We assess the effects of: (1) altering the total dollar value of the pre-paid incentive (“incentive effect”), (2) giving two identical ...
Firms Expect Working from Home to Triple
The coronavirus and efforts to mitigate its impact are having a transformative impact on many aspects of economic life, intensifying trends like shopping online rather than visiting brick-and-mortar stores and increasing the incidence of working from home. Indeed, many tech giants have already made working from home a permanent option for employees.
Working Paper
The Swaps Strike Back: Evaluating Expectations of One-Year Inflation
This study examines the forecasting performance of inflation swaps and survey-based expectations for one-year inflation. Conducting this exercise helps determine if one set of expectations can provide a cleaner signal about future inflation. The study finds that, overall, inflation swaps more frequently provide better forecasts of future inflation. Previous studies that found poor performance of swaps were strongly influenced by liquidity issues during the financial crisis and the pandemic. When these periods are excluded, swaps have superior predictive ability. Our analysis suggests that ...
Report
More Unequal We Stand? Inequality Dynamics in the United States, 1967–2021
Heathcote et al. (2010) conducted an empirical analysis of several dimensions of inequality in the United States over the years 1967-2006, using publicly-available survey data. This paper expands the analysis, and extends it to 2021. We find that since the early 2000s, the college wage premium has stopped growing, and the race wage gap has stalled. However, the gender wage gap has kept shrinking. Both individual- and household-level income inequality have continued to rise at the top, while the cyclical component of inequality dominates dynamics below the median. Inequality in consumption ...
Working Paper
Indirect Consumer Inflation Expectations: Theory and Evidence
Based on indirect utility theory, we introduce a novel methodology of measuring inflation expectations indirectly. This methodology starts at the individual level, asking consumers about the change in income required to buy the same amounts of goods and services one year ahead. Analytically, our methodology possesses smaller ex-post aggregate inflation forecast errors relative to forecasts based on conventional survey questions. We ask this question in a large-scale, high-frequency survey of consumers in the US and 14 countries, and we show that indirect consumer inflation expectations ...
Working Paper
Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey: survey methodology and performance
The Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey (TMOS) is a monthly survey of area manufacturers conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. TMOS indexes provide timely information on manufacturing activity in Texas, which is useful for understanding broader changes in regional economic conditions. This paper describes the survey methodology and analyzes the explanatory and predictive power of TMOS indexes with regard to other measures of state economic activity. Regression analysis shows that several TMOS indexes successfully explain monthly changes in Texas employment and quarterly changes in ...