Serving the public with innovative research and analysis
Research Spotlight
Second Annual Workshop on Macroeconomic Implications of Migration: Call for Papers
The Bank of Canada, the Global Migration Center at the University of California, Davis, the Economics Department at ITAM, and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco would like to invite you to submit a paper to the second edition of the workshop on the Macroeconomic Implications of Migration that will take place at the SF Fed on August 25, 2023.
We invite researchers to submit working papers by Friday, April 15, 2023. Read our Call for Papers for more information.
Recent Publications
FedViews
Economic Outlook
Thuy Lan Nguyen, senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, stated her views on the current economy and the outlook as of March 9, 2023.
Economic Letter
House Prices Respond Promptly to Monetary Policy Surprises
New evidence based on listings of homes for sale from 2000 to 2019 suggests house prices adjust to monetary policy changes over weeks rather than years, faster than previously thought. Housing list prices fall within two weeks after the Federal Reserve announces an unexpected policy tightening, similar to responses of other financial assets. House prices respond more strongly to unexpected changes in long-term interest rates than to surprises in the short-term federal funds rate. Changes in mortgage rates following Fed announcements are key to explaining this rapid house price reaction.
Working Paper
The Quality-Adjusted Cyclical Price of Labor
Typical measures of wages, such as average hourly earnings, fail to capture cyclicality in the effective cost of labor in the presence of (i) cyclical fluctuations in the quality of worker-firm matches, or (ii) wages being smoothed within employment matches. To address both concerns, we estimate cyclicality in labor’s user cost exploiting the longrun wage in a match to control for match quality. Using NLSY data for 1980 to 2019, we identify three channels by which hiring in a recession affects user cost: It lowers the new-hire wage; it lowers wages going forward in the match; but it also results in higher subsequent separations. All totaled, we find that labor’s user cost is highly procyclical, increasing by more than 4% for a 1 pp decline in the unemployment rate. For large recessions, like the Great Recession, that implies a decline in the price of labor of about 15%.
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.
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.
Proxy Funds Rate
The Proxy Funds Rate uses a broad set of financial market indicators to assess the stance of monetary policy. The proxy rate can be interpreted as indicating what federal funds rate would typically be associated with prevailing financial market conditions if the federal funds rate were the only monetary policy tool being used.
SF Fed Data Explorer
The SF Fed Data Explorer is an interactive tool that gives users the ability to explore, analyze, and download detailed data for various groups of people in the U.S. labor market. The data come from responses to the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS).
Supply- and Demand-Driven PCE Inflation
Supply- versus Demand-Driven PCE Inflation determines the monthly contributions to both headline and core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) inflation from supply-driven versus demand-driven components.
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.
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.
