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Working Paper
OPEC in the News
This paper introduces a newspaper article count index related to OPEC that rises in response to important OPEC meetings and events connected with OPEC production levels. I use this index to measure how interest in OPEC varies over time and investigate how oil price volatility behaves when the index unexpectedly changes. I find that unexpected increases in the newspaper index are strongly associated with higher levels of oil price volatility, both realized and implied. In some cases, interest levels and price volatility appear to be driven by the OPEC event itself, such as the Iraq invasion of ...
Working Paper
Households' Preferences Over Inflation and Monetary Policy Tradeoffs
We document novel facts about US household preferences over inflation and monetary policy tradeoffs. Many households were attentive to news about monetary policy and to interest rates in 2023. The median household perceives the Federal Reserve's inflation objective to be 3 percent, but would prefer it to be lower. Quantifying the tradeoff between inflation and unemployment, we find an average acceptable sacrifice ratio of 0.6, implying that households are likely to find disinflation costly. Average preferences are well represented by a non-linear loss function with near equal weights on ...