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Working Paper
Mobility and Engagement Following the SARS-Cov-2 Outbreak
We develop a Mobility and Engagement Index (MEI) based on a range of mobility metrics from Safegraph geolocation data, and validate the index with mobility data from Google and Unacast. We construct MEIs at the county, MSA, state and nationwide level, and link these measures to indicators of economic activity. According to our measures, the bulk of sheltering-in-place and social disengagement occurred during the week of March 15 and simultaneously across the U.S. At the national peak of the decline in mobility in early April, localities that engaged in a 10% larger decrease in mobility than ...
Average Inflation over the Pandemic Avoids 'Base-Effect' Distortions
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic early last year, the nation has seen enormous swings in consumer prices, with extraordinary declines last spring giving way to similarly eye-popping increases as the economy has reopened.
Nominal GDP Outlook Suggests It's Time to End Monetary Accommodation
We argue that the policy response to COVID-19 has been broadly on track to date but that continued monetary accommodation (lowering interest rates or purchasing assets) risks fueling excessive inflation.
Inflation in Services Likely to Rise Further Despite Slowing Goods Prices
Given rising demand for in-person services, the slow pass-through of surging house prices to rent and owners’ equivalent rent (OER), and higher health care worker wages, services inflation is likely to increase further.
How long is the soft-landing runway for the labor market?
A normalized labor market likely entails a more-usual relationship between layoffs and labor market tightness indicators, and sooner or later, a higher unemployment rate.
What Might Inflation Look Like Next Year?
In our baseline scenario, core inflation is 2.6 percent in 2022. If this occurs, core inflation will have averaged 2.4 percent over the last five years, moderately above the Fed’s 2.0 percent inflation target.
Journal Article
Assessing the costs and consequences of the 2007–09 financial crisis and its aftermath
There are few estimates of what society gave up due to the crisis: Our conservative estimate is $50,000 to $120,000 for every U.S. household.
The Production Process Drives Fluctuations in Output and Uncertainty
If economic developments drive most of the changes in uncertainty—rather than the reverse—then the direct effect of a change in uncertainty on economic activity is much smaller than previous research has shown.
Working Paper
Complementarity and Macroeconomic Uncertainty
Macroeconomic uncertainty—the conditional volatility of the unforecastable component of a future value of a time series—shows considerable variation in the data. A typical assumption in business cycle models is that production is Cobb-Douglas. Under that assumption, this paper shows there is usually little, if any, endogenous variation in output uncertainty, and first moment shocks have similar effects in all states of the economy. When the model departs from Cobb-Douglas production and assumes capital and labor are gross complements, first-moment shocks have state-dependent effects and ...
Journal Article
America’s Missing Workers Are Primarily Middle Educated
The labor force participation rate has fallen since 2008, partly due to an aging population and despite a more highly educated one. After accounting for aging, those whose highest educational attainment is a high school diploma, some college or an associate degree have primarily driven the participation decrease.