Search Results
Working Paper
Surveying Business Uncertainty
We elicit subjective probability distributions from business executives about their own-firm outcomes at a one-year look-ahead horizon. In terms of question design, our key innovation is to let survey respondents freely select support points and probabilities in five-point distributions over future sales growth, employment, and investment. In terms of data collection, we develop and field a new monthly panel Survey of Business Uncertainty (SBU). The SBU began in 2014 and now covers about 1,750 firms drawn from all 50 states, every major nonfarm industry, and a range of firm sizes. We find ...
Discussion Paper
The Region Is Struggling to Recover from the Pandemic Recession
The pandemic struck the New York-Northern New Jersey region early and hard, and the economy is still struggling to recover nearly two years later. Indeed, employment fell by 20 percent in New York City as the pandemic took hold, a significantly sharper decline than for the nation as a whole, and the rest of the region wasn’t far behind, creating a much larger hole to dig out of than other parts of the country. While the region saw significant growth as the economy began to heal, growth has slowed noticeably, and job shortfalls—that is, the amount by which employment remains below ...
Journal Article
Federal Reserve: Good Data is Hard to Find
Fed officials frequently describe their monetary policy decisions as data dependent. As the central bank has navigated the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, a common refrain in its policy statements is that the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) will "carefully assess incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks" when considering further adjustments."We are looking at the data to guide us in what we should do," Fed Chair Jerome Powell said at the press conference following the FOMC's meeting at the end of January.The demand for data in economics as a whole has only grown ...
Discussion Paper
Introducing the FRBNY Survey of Consumer Expectations: Survey Goals, Design and Content
Starting in the first quarter of 2014, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY) will begin reporting findings from a new national survey designed to elicit consumers? expectations for a wide range of household-level and aggregate economic and financial conditions. This week, we provide an introduction to the new survey in a series of four blog posts. In this first post, we discuss the overall objectives of the new survey, its sample design, and content. In the posts that follow, we will provide further details and present preliminary findings from the survey on three broad categories of ...
Working Paper
Practice Makes Perfect: Learning Effects with Household Point and Density Forecasts of Inflation
This paper shows how both the characteristics and the accuracy of the point and density forecasts from a well-known panel data survey of households' inflationary expectations – the New York Fed's Survey of Consumer Expectations – depend on the tenure of survey respondents. Households' point and density forecasts of inflation become significantly more accurate with repeated practice of completing the survey. These learning gains are best identified when tenure-based combination forecasts are constructed. Tenured households on average produce lower point forecasts of inflation, perceive ...
Working Paper
Average Inflation Targeting and Household Expectations
Using a daily survey of U.S. households, we study how the Federal Reserve’s announcement of its new strategy of average inflation targeting affected households’ expectations. Starting with the day of the announcement, there is a very small uptick in the minority of households reporting that they had heard news about monetary policy relative to prior to the announcement, but this effect fades within a few days. Those hearing news about the announcement do not seem to have understood the announcement: they are no more likely to correctly identify the Fed’s new strategy than others, nor ...
Journal Article
Sentiment Analysis of the Fifth District Manufacturing and Service Surveys
This article uses basic text analytic techniques to examine the sentiment embodied in two surveys conducted by the Richmond Fed: the Manufacturing and Service Sector Surveys. Specifically, the article develops several sentiment indicators based on the comments provided by survey participants, contrasts the sentiment measures against responses to other survey questions, and analyzes the monthly evolution of the sentiment indicators during the period 2002-18. Two main conclusions emerge from the analysis. First, the indicators reflect reasonably well changes in economic sentiment along time. ...
Working Paper
Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey: Survey Methodology, Performance and Forecast Accuracy
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 track changes in Texas employment, gross domestic product and consumer ...
Discussion Paper
Severe Supply Disruptions Are Impeding Business Activity in the Region
As the economy continues to recover from the pandemic recession, many businesses are struggling to keep up with surging demand amid widespread supply shortages and delays. While a rare phenomenon before the pandemic, supply chain disruptions have become increasingly common, with transportation of goods becoming especially tricky due to myriad issues such as clogged ports and difficulty finding truck drivers. Indeed, such supply disruptions are expected to continue into next year. Our October regional business surveys asked firms to what extent, if any, they are being affected by supply ...
Working Paper
The Effects of Interest Rate Increases on Consumers' Inflation Expectations: The Roles of Informedness and Compliance
We study how monetary policy communications associated with increasing the federal funds rate causally affect consumers' inflation expectations. In a large-scale, multi-wave randomized controlled trial (RCT), we find weak evidence on average that communicating policy changes lowers consumers' medium-term inflation expectations. However, information differs systematically across demographic groups, in terms of ex ante informedness about monetary policy and ex post compliance with the information treatment. Monetary policy communications have a much stronger effect on people who had not ...