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COVID-19 Caused 3 New Hires for Every 10 Layoffs
Reports about the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic and efforts to slow its spread make for grim reading. One especially grim statistic is the number of layoffs. Since early March, just over 28 million persons have filed new claims for unemployment insurance benefits (roughly 30 million if you seasonally adjust).
U.S. Firms Foresee Intensifying Coronavirus Impact
In late March—even before many states had issued shelter-in-place, stay-at-home, or shutdown orders—we noted that firms were bracing for a huge negative impact on sales revenues from developments surrounding the coronavirus. Results from our March Survey of Business Uncertainty (SBU)—a national survey of firms of varying sizes and industries—revealed that disruptions stemming from COVID-19 had led to sharp declines in expectations for year-ahead sales growth.
Working Paper
Texas Service Sector Outlook Survey: Survey Methodology and Performance
The Texas Service Sector Outlook Survey (TSSOS) and Texas Retail Outlook Survey (TROS) are monthly surveys of service sector and retail firms in Texas conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. TSSOS and TROS track the Texas private services sector, including general service businesses, retailers and wholesalers. The surveys provide invaluable information on regional economic conditions?information that Dallas Fed economists and the Bank president use in the formulation of monetary policy. This paper describes the survey?s methodology and analyzes the explanatory and predictive power of ...
Introducing the CFO Survey
For almost 25 years, the Duke CFO Global Business Outlook has provided policymakers, academics, and the public with an understanding of how financial executives view the economy and prospects for their business. Today, three partners—Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta—announce an enhanced iteration of this survey, now called the CFO Survey. Starting with the second-quarter data release on July 8, 2020, the CFO Survey will offer the same crucial information about the economic outlook and, through some ...
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 ...
Working Paper
Term structures of inflation expectations and real interest rates
Revised September 2016. In this paper, I use a statistical model to combine various surveys to produce a term structure of inflation expectations--inflation expectations at any horizon--and an associated term structure of real interest rates. Inflation expectations extracted from this model track realized inflation quite well, and in terms of forecast accuracy, they are at par with or superior to some popular alternatives. Looking at the period 2008.2015, I conclude that long-run inflation expectations remained anchored, and the policies of the Federal Reserve provided a large level of ...
American Firms Foresee a Huge Negative Impact of the Coronavirus
The rapid unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic has created grave concerns for the health and welfare of the U.S. population and the economy. The economic worries are very apparent in financial markets. From the closing bell on February 21 through March 20, U.S. equities fell more than 30 percent, and stock market volatility skyrocketed.
A Couple of Insights from the April Current Population Survey
The latest reading of the Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker indicates that wage growth is slowing. It came in at 3.3 percent for April, down from 3.5 percent in March and 3.7 percent in February. This slowing primarily reflects the relatively large decline in the employment of those who typically experience the fastest wage growth: young workers. In February, those aged 16–24 accounted for about 12 percent of employment. By April, that share had dropped to under 10 percent. This change has significant bearing on the Wage Growth Tracker because those aged 16–24 had median wage growth of ...
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
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 ...