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Report
Newer need not be better: evaluating the Penn World Tables and the World Development Indicators using nighttime lights
Nighttime lights data are a measure of economic activity whose measurement error is plausibly independent of the errors of most conventional indicators. Therefore, we can use nighttime lights as an independent benchmark to assess existing measures of economic activity (Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin 2016). We employ this insight to find out which vintages of the Penn World Tables (PWT) and of the World Development Indicators (WDI) better estimate true income per capita. We find that revisions of the PWT do not necessarily dominate their predecessors in terms of explaining nighttime lights (and ...
Journal Article
Lingering Residual Seasonality in GDP Growth
Measuring economic growth is complicated by seasonality, the regular fluctuation in economic activity that depends on the season of the year. The Bureau of Economic Analysis uses statistical techniques to remove seasonality from its estimates of GDP, and, in 2015, it took steps to improve the seasonal adjustment of data back to 2012. I show that residual seasonality in GDP growth remains even after these adjustments, has been a longer-term phenomenon, and is particularly noticeable in the 1990s. The size of this residual seasonality is economically meaningful and has the ability to change the ...
Journal Article
Do we know what we owe? Consumer debt as reported by borrowers and lenders
Household surveys are the source of some of the most widely studied data on consumer balance sheets, with the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) generally cited as the leading source of wealth data for the United States. At the same time, recent research questions survey respondents? propensity and ability to report debt characteristics accurately. This study compares household debt as reported by borrowers to the SCF with household debt as reported by lenders to Equifax using the new FRBNY Consumer Credit Panel (CCP). The borrower and lender debt distributions are compared by year, age of ...
Working Paper
A Simple Framework to Monitor Inflation
This paper proposes a simple framework to help monitor and understand movements in PCE inflation in real time. The approach is to decompose inflation using simple categorical-level regressions or systems of equations. The estimates are then used to group categories into components of PCE inflation. I review some applications of the methodology, and show how it can help explain inflation dynamics over recent episodes. The methodology shows that inflation remained low in the mid-2010s primarily because of factors unrelated to aggregate economic conditions. I also apply the methodology to ...
Working Paper
Valuing “free” media across countries in GDP
?Free? consumer entertainment and information from the Internet, largely supported by advertising revenues, has had a major impact on consumer behavior. Some economists believe that measured gross domestic product (GDP) growth since 2000 is too low because it excludes online entertainment (Brynjolfsson and Oh 2012; Ito 2013). Similar large effects on consumers occurred with the arrival of free radio and television entertainment. We provide an experimental methodology that uses previously established GDP measurement procedures to value advertising-supported entertainment around the world. The ...
Speech
Reforming culture for the long term : Remarks at the Banking Standards Board, London, United Kingdom
Remarks at the Banking Standards Board, London, United Kingdom .
Report
Do we know what we owe? A comparison of borrower- and lender-reported consumer debt
Household surveys are the source of some of the most widely studied data on consumer balance sheets, with the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) generally cited as the leading source of wealth data for the United States. At the same time, recent research questions survey respondents? propensity and ability to report debt characteristics accurately. We compare household debt as reported by borrowers to the SCF with household debt as reported by lenders to Equifax using the new FRBNY Consumer Credit Panel (CCP). Moments of the borrower and lender debt distributions are compared by year, age of ...
Speech
The past and future of supervisory stress testing design: remarks at the 2018 Federal Reserve Stress Testing Research Conference, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
Remarks at the 2018 Federal Reserve Stress Testing Research Conference, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Boston.
Report
An overview of the Survey of Consumer Expectations
This report presents an overview of the Survey of Consumer Expectations, a new monthly online survey of a rotating panel of household heads. The survey collects timely information on consumers? expectations and decisions on a broad variety of topics, including but not limited to inflation, household finance, the labor market, and the housing market. There are three main goals of the survey: (1) measuring consumer expectations at a high frequency, (2) understanding how these expectations are formed, and (3) investigating the link between expectations and behavior. This report discusses the ...
Working Paper
Creativity and economic growth: theory, measures, and potentials for morocco
The current era of globalization is dominated by the rise of investments in intangible capital rather than tangible capital ? the ascendance of creativity over plant and equipment. This brief paper is motivated by the possibility that emerging market economies such as Morocco might take greater advantage of new tools and policies designed for this new era. To begin, I discuss the transformation of the global economy and the consequences of the transformed global economy for economic thinking and measurement. I refer to both old and new literature on the measurement of intangible investment ...