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Research Spotlight
Interview Looks Back at First Year of Virtual Seminar on Climate Economics
For more than a year, the San Francisco Fed has run its Virtual Seminar on Climate Economics to help economists estimate, model, and propose policies to mitigate climate risk. In an interview with the Center for Economic Policy Research’s Tim Phillips, senior policy advisor Glenn Rudebusch of the San Francisco Fed discusses how the seminars are bringing fresh interdisciplinary research to a wider audience.
Watch the video interview on the VoxEU/CEPR website.
Recent Publications
FedViews
Economic Outlook
Andrew Foerster, senior research advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, stated his views on the current economy and the outlook as of September 9, 2021.
Economic Letter
How Do Business Cycles Affect Worker Groups Differently?
Racial disparities in socioeconomic outcomes for the U.S. population are often masked by aggregate statistics. Unemployment rates vary significantly across groups according to gender and race or ethnicity and have different sensitivities to the business cycle. Focusing on jobless rates by demographic groups shows that Black and Hispanic workers, particularly men, are the most sensitive to periods of economic growth and decline. This higher sensitivity persists across individuals with the same education level. Occupation plays a role in explaining the relative cyclical differences in unemployment rates across demographic groups.
Working Paper
Turbulent Business Cycles
Recessions are associated with sharp increases in turbulence that reshuffles firms' productivity rankings. To study the business cycle implications of turbulence shocks, we use Compustat data to construct a measure of turbulence based on the (inverse of) Spearman correlations of firms' productivity rankings between adjacent years. We document evidence that turbulence rises in recessions, reallocating labor and capital from high-to low-productivity firms and reducing aggregate TFP and the stock market value of firms. A real business cycle model with heterogeneous firms and financial frictions can generate the observed macroeconomic and reallocation effects of turbulence. In the model, increased turbulence makes high-productivity firms less likely to remain productive, reducing their expected equity values and tightening their borrowing constraints relative to low-productivity firms. Thus, labor and capital are reallocated to low-productivity firms, reducing aggregate TFP and generating a recession with synchronized declines in aggregate output, consumption, investment, and labor hours, in line with empirical evidence.
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.
