Macroeconomics

Woman in a laboratory wearing goggles and using a touch-screen device.

Article

Measuring Technology Adoption: What Can Job Ads Tell Us?

08 Mar ’21

Research in Focus — Sarada of the Wisconsin School of Business and the Fed’s Enghin Atalay uncover a novel way to measure how firms adopt technology.

Featured Work

Macroeconomics

Working Paper

The Future of Labor: Automation and the Labor Share in the Second Machine Age

Hong Cheng
Lukasz Drozd
Rahul Giri
Mathieu Taschereau-Dumouchel
Junjie Xia

March 2021

WP 21-11 – We study the effect of modern automation on firm-level labor shares using a 2018 survey of 1,618 manufacturing firms in China.

Macroeconomics

Article

Time Spent at Work Is About More Than Just Wages

Research in Focus – Ryan Michaels of the Philadelphia Fed and economists Michele Battisti and Choonsung Park identify driving forces behind changes in working time and earnings.

Macroeconomics

Article

Replacement Hiring Means Job Vacancies Beget More Vacancies, Amplifying Swings in the Labor Market

Research in Focus – Michael W.L. Elsby of the University of Edinburgh and the Fed's Ryan Michaels and David Ratner explore how pressure to replace quits drives bigger swings in job vacancies and hiring.

Featured Data

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Livingston Survey

The oldest continuous survey of economists' expectations that summarizes the forecasts of economists from industry, government, banking, and academia

Updated: 18 Dec ’20

Survey of Professional Forecasters

The oldest quarterly survey of macroeconomic forecasts in the United States

Updated: 12 Feb ’21

Aruoba-Diebold-Scotti Business Conditions Index

An index designed to track real business conditions at high observation frequency

Updated: 08 Apr ’21

Real-Time Data Set for Macroeconomists

The real-time data set consists of vintages, or snapshots, of time series of major macroeconomic variables. The data set may be used by macroeconomic researchers to verify empirical results, to analyze policy, or to forecast. New vintages are added monthly.

Updated: 26 Mar ’21

GDPplus

Measure of the quarter-over-quarter rate of growth of real output in continuously compounded annualized percentage points

Updated: 25 Mar ’21

Aruoba Term Structure of Inflation Expectations

A continuous curve of inflation expectations three to 120 months ahead, analogous to a yield curve

Updated: 31 Mar ’21

All Work

Macroeconomics

Article

Economic Growth and Inflation: Can They Be Measured Better?

Research in Focus — The Fed’s Leonard Nakamura suggests that the U.S. economy may be growing more quickly — and inflation growing more slowly — than current measures indicate.

Banking and Financial Markets

Working Paper

Is a Friend in Need a Friend Indeed? How Relationship Borrowers Fare during the COVID-19 Crisis

Allen N. Berger
Christa H.S. Bouwman
Lars Norden
Raluca A. Roman
Gregory F. Udell
Teng Wang

March 2021

WP 21-13 – We analyze loan contract terms, investigating whether relationship borrowers fare better or worse than others in times of need, using the COVID-19 crisis as a quasi-natural experiment.

Macroeconomics

Article

Q&A with Ryan Michaels

Economic Insights — The author of this issue's article about how state policies in response to COVID-19 affected unemployment tells us how he became interested in economics.

Macroeconomics

Article

Isolating the Effect of State Business Closure Orders on Employment

Ryan Michaels

Q1 2021

Economic Insights — To fight COVID-19, most states restricted business activity. At the same time, the nation experienced historic rates of job loss. How much of that loss was due to those restrictions?

The Economy

Article

Research Department Visiting Scholars

The Research Department maintains an active visiting scholars program. Following is a list of recent visitors.

Macroeconomics

Working Paper

The Future of Labor: Automation and the Labor Share in the Second Machine Age

Hong Cheng
Lukasz Drozd
Rahul Giri
Mathieu Taschereau-Dumouchel
Junjie Xia

March 2021

WP 21-11 – We study the effect of modern automation on firm-level labor shares using a 2018 survey of 1,618 manufacturing firms in China.

Macroeconomics

Article

Measuring Technology Adoption: What Can Job Ads Tell Us?

Research in Focus — Sarada of the Wisconsin School of Business and the Fed’s Enghin Atalay uncover a novel way to measure how firms adopt technology.

Macroeconomics

Report

On the Causes of Declines in the Labor Force Participation Rate

Shigeru Fujita

February 2014

The unemployment rate stood at 5.0 percent when the Great Recession started in December 2007 but had more than doubled toward the end of 2009, peaking at 10 percent. Since then, however, it has steadily declined.

Macroeconomics

Working Paper

On the Aggregation of Probability Assessments: Regularized Mixtures of Predictive Densities for Eurozone Inflation and Real Interest Rates

Francis X. Diebold
Minchul Shin
Boyuan Zhang

February 2021

WP 21-06 – We propose methods for constructing regularized mixtures of density forecasts.

Macroeconomics

Article

Replacement Hiring Means Job Vacancies Beget More Vacancies, Amplifying Swings in the Labor Market

Macroeconomics

Article

Time Spent at Work Is About More Than Just Wages

Research in Focus – Ryan Michaels of the Philadelphia Fed and economists Michele Battisti and Choonsung Park identify driving forces behind changes in working time and earnings.

Banking and Financial Markets

Report

Bank Capital and Lending During a Downturn

Pablo D'Erasmo

January 2021

Research Brief – As COVID-19 raged, the Fed encouraged banks to use capital buffers and temporarily adjusted capital regulation to reduce the pandemic's impact, raising the question: How important is the capital lending channel in a downturn?

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