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Research Spotlight
Quora Session Features Answers on Automation, Inflation, and More
Is the global economy showing signs of growth or catastrophy? How can we mitigate the damage that automation may do to the workforce? How can economics be more accessible to the public? Why does the San Francisco Fed exist? Sylvain Leduc and Andrew Foerster answered these and other questions posed by the public during a recent Quora session.
Recent Publications
FedViews
Economic Outlook
Reuven Glick, group vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, stated his views on the current economy and the outlook as of October 11, 2019.
Economic Letter
Is Rising Concentration Hampering Productivity Growth?
U.S. productivity is growing slower than in the past. Meanwhile, sales have become increasingly concentrated in the largest businesses. Analysis suggests that IT innovation may have facilitated the rise in concentration by reducing the cost for large firms to enter new markets. This contributed to booming productivity growth from 1995 to 2005. Though large firms are more profitable, their expansion may have increased competition and reduced profit margins within markets. Lower profit margins in a given market could have deterred innovation, eventually lowering growth.
Working Paper
Anchored Inflation Expectations and the Flatter Phillips Curve
Conventional versions of the Phillips curve cannot account for inflation dynamics during and after the U.S. Great Recession, leading many to conclude that the Phillips curve relationship has weakened or even disappeared. We show that if agents solve a signal extraction problem to disentangle temporary versus permanent shocks to inflation, then agents' inflation expectations should have become more "anchored" over the Great Moderation period. An estimated New Keynesian Phillips curve that accounts for the increased anchoring of expected inflation exhibits a stable slope coefficient over the period 1960 to 2019. Out-of-sample forecasts show that this model can account for the "missing disinflation" during the U.S. Great Recession and the "missing inflation" during the subsequent recovery. We use a simple three-equation New Keynesian model to show that an increase in the Taylor rule coefficient on inflation (or the output gap) serves to endogenously anchor agents' subjective inflation expectations and thereby "flatten" the reduced-form Phillips curve.
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).
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.
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.
Tech Pulse
The Tech Pulse Index is an index of coincident indicators of activity in the U.S. information technology sector. It can be interpreted as a summary statistic that tracks the health of the tech sector in a timely manner.
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.
