Serving the public with innovative research and analysis
Research Spotlight
New Future of Work Survey: What Will the Post-Pandemic Workplace Look Like?
What changes are in store for the workplace in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic? Business leaders from across our District’s nine western states plan to prioritize worker needs and safety when deciding how to move forward, according to our New Future of Work survey.
Learn more in the SF Fed Blog by Hishgee Jargalsaikhan and Luiz Oliveira.
Recent Publications
FedViews
Economic Outlook
Sylvain Leduc, executive vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, stated his views on the current economy and the outlook as of July 15, 2021.
Economic Letter
Do Households Expect Inflation When Commodities Surge?
Household surveys indicate that consumers expect higher inflation this year than in recent years, as the U.S. economy rebounds from the deep recession. This has coincided with a surge in commodity prices, as strong demand for goods like gas, food, and construction materials is catching producers with low supplies. Evidence suggests that households respond to commodity price increases by raising their expectations of future inflation. However, since surges in commodity prices are transitory, their effects on inflation expectations—particularly long-term expectations—are modest and short-lived.
Working Paper
International Evidence on Extending Sovereign Debt Maturities
Portfolio diversification is as important to debt management as it is to asset management. In this paper, we focus on diversification of sovereign debt issuance by examining the extension of the maximum maturity of issued debt. In particular, we examine the potential costs to the U.S. Treasury of introducing 50-year bonds as a financing option. Based on evidence from foreign government bond markets with such long-term debt, our results suggest that a 50-year Treasury bond would likely trade at an average yield that is at most 20 basis points above that of a 30-year bond. Our results based on extrapolations from a dynamic yield curve model using just U.S. Treasury yields are similar.
Indicators and Data
China Cyclical Activity Tracker
The China Cyclical Activity Tracker, China CAT, is an alternative measure of China’s economic growth based on research in Fernald, Hsu, and Spiegel (2019).
COVID-19 Forecasts by County
COVID-19 Forecasts by County projects future infection growth rates for various horizons using near real-time data on social distancing behavior, weather, vaccinations, and confirmed COVID-19 cases per capita. The forecasts are based on the estimated relationship between transmission factors and subsequent infection growth over the pandemic to date.
Cyclical and Acyclical Core PCE Inflation
Cyclical and Acyclical Core PCE Inflation divides components of core personal consumption expenditures according to whether they move in tandem with economic cycles or are independent of the state of the overall economy.
Daily News Sentiment Index
The Daily News Sentiment Index is a high frequency measure of U.S. economic sentiment based on lexical analysis of economics-related news articles.
Inflation Sensitivity to COVID-19
Inflation Sensitivity to COVID-19 divides core personal consumption expenditures inflation into components that are sensitive and insensitive to the economic disruptions caused by the pandemic.
PCE Inflation Dispersion
PCE Inflation Dispersion statistics present a more detailed summary of the personal consumption expenditure price index (PCEPI), a measure of U.S. inflation. Included are measures of the distribution of price changes across categories and diffusion indices.
Total Factor Productivity
Total Factor Productivity (TFP) presents a real-time, quarterly data series for the U.S. business sector, adjusted for variations in factor utilization—labor effort and capital’s workweek.
Treasury Yield Premiums
The Treasury yield premium model decomposes nominal bond yields of various maturities into three components: expectations of the average future short-term interest rate, a term premium, and a model residual.
Wage Rigidity Meter
The Wage Rigidity Meter offers a closer examination of the annual wage changes of U.S. workers that have not changed jobs over the year.
Weather-Adjusted Employment Change
This page provides estimates of weather-adjusted employment change in the United States for the past six months. The estimates are aggregated from county-level estimates of weather’s employment effects, which were derived from a county-level analysis of the short-run effects of unusual weather on employment growth.
