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Working Paper
The perils of working with Big Data and a SMALL framework you can use to avoid them
The use of “Big Data” to explain fluctuations in the broader economy or guide the business decisions of a firm is now so commonplace that in some instances it has even begun to rival more traditional government statistics and business analytics. Big data sources can very often provide advantages when compared to these more traditional data sources, but with these advantages also comes the potential for pitfalls. We lay out a framework called SMALL that we have developed in order to help interested parties as they navigate the big data minefield. Based on a set of five questions, the SMALL ...
Working Paper
The perils of working with Big Data and a SMALL framework you can use to avoid them
The use of “Big Data” to explain fluctuations in the broader economy or guide the business decisions of a firm is now so commonplace that in some instances it has even begun to rival more traditional government statistics and business analytics. Big data sources can very often provide advantages when compared to these more traditional data sources, but with these advantages also comes the potential for pitfalls. We lay out a framework called SMALL that we have developed in order to help interested parties as they navigate the big data minefield. Based on a set of five questions, the SMALL ...
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Journal Article
Understanding the Distribution of Inflation Expectations
Inflation expectations are central to monetary policy but are often summarized by a single statistic such as the mean or median forecast. This article argues for a distributional view in which the full cross-sectional distribution of beliefs is the relevant object. We first organize the literature around the main distributional features of inflation expectations: the level of expected inflation, disagreement across agents, subjective uncertainty within agents, skewness, and tail behavior. The literature consistently documents large and time-varying disagreement, systematic demographic ...