« Making Analysis of the Current Population Survey Easier | Main The Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker has shown an uptick during the past several months. The 12-month average reached 3.7 percent in June, up from 3.2 percent last year. But …

« Mapping the Financial Frontier at the Financial Markets Conference | Main Speaking from experience, research projects often require many grueling hours of deciphering obtuse data dictionaries, recoding variable definitions to be consistent, and checking for data errors. Inevitably, you miss …

« The Tax Cut and Jobs Act, SALT, and the Blue State Blues: It’s All Relative | Main The Atlanta Fed recently hosted its 24th annual Financial Markets Conference, whose theme was Mapping the Financial Frontier: What Does the Next Decade …

« Improving Labor Force Participation | Main | Mapping the Financial Frontier at the Financial Markets Conference » Nearly two months have passed since tax day, but the full impact of the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA) …

« Tariff Worries and U.S. Business Investment, Take Two | Main The share of the prime-age population engaged in the U.S. labor market is on the rise, led by a sharp rebound in the labor force participation (LFP) rate by prime-age …

« Trends in Hispanic Labor Force Participation | Main Last summer, we reported that one fifth of firms in the July Survey of Business Uncertainty (SBU) were reassessing capital expenditure plans in light of then-recent tariff hikes and retaliation concerns. Roughly …

« Quantitative Frightening? | Main Although the labor force participation (LFP) rate has fallen significantly for the overall population during the past two decades, the trends can differ a great deal depending on which demographic group you examine. One way to …

« Are Employers Focusing More on Staff Retention? | Main I didn’t coin the title of this blog post. It was the label on a chart of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet that appeared in an issue of The Wall Street …

« Defining Job Switchers in the Wage Growth Tracker | Main Many people are quitting their current job. According to data from the Job Openings, Layoffs, and Turnover Survey (JOLTS) from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers are voluntarily leaving …

« Cryptocurrency and Central Bank E-Money | Main Among the questions we receive about the Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker, one of the most frequent is about the construction of the job switcher and job stayer series. These series are derived …

« Polarization through the Prism of the Wage Growth Tracker (Take Two) | Main The Atlanta Fed recently hosted a workshop, “Financial Stability Implications of New Technology,” which was cosponsored by the Center for the Economic Analysis of Risk at Georgia …

« Polarization through the Prism of the Wage Growth Tracker | Main In a previous macroblog post, I thought I had discovered an interesting differential between the wage growth of middle-wage earners and that of low/high-paid workers. It turns out that …

« On Maximizing Employment, a Case for Caution | Main One of the most frequent questions we receive about the Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker (the median of year-over-year percent changes in individuals’ hourly wage) is about the relationship between wage …

« Demographically Adjusting the Wage Growth Tracker | Main Over the past few months, I have been asked one question regularly: Why is the Fed removing monetary policy stimulus when there is little sign that inflation has run amok and threatens …

« Improving Labor Market Fortunes for Workers with the Least Schooling | Main “Nobody’s model does a very good job of how uncertainty and hits to confidence affect behavior,” says Deutsche Bank’s Peter Hooper in a recent Wall Street Journal article. …

« Part-Time Workers Are Less Likely to Get a Pay Raise | Main A recent Wall Street Journal story observed that the strong labor market is having a particularly positive impact on those with the least amount of formal schooling. Research …

« Learning about an ML-Driven Economy | Main A recent FEDS Notes article summarized some interesting findings from the Board of Governors’ 2017 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking. One set of responses that caught my eye explored the connection between …

« Hitting a Cyclical High: The Wage Growth Premium from Changing Jobs | Main Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have drawn considerable attention from both the real and financial sides of the economy. The Atlanta Fed’s recent …

« Thoughts on a Long-Run Monetary Policy Framework, Part 4: Flexible Price-Level Targeting in the Big Picture | Main The Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker rose 3.3 percent in March. While this increase is up from 2.9 percent in February, the …

« Thoughts on a Long-Run Monetary Policy Framework, Part 3: An Example of Flexible Price-Level Targeting | Main In the second post of this series, I enumerated several alternative monetary policy frameworks. Each is motivated by a recognition that the Federal …

« Thoughts on a Long-Run Monetary Policy Framework, Part 2: The Principle of Bounded Nominal Uncertainty | Main I want to start my discussion in this post with two points I made in the previous two macroblog posts (here and here). …

« Thoughts on a Long-Run Monetary Policy Framework: Framing the Question | Main In yesterday’s macroblog post, I discussed one of the central monetary policy questions of the day: Is the possibility of hitting the lower bound on policy rates likely …

« What Are Businesses Saying about Tax Reform Now? | Main “Should the Fed stick with the 2 percent inflation target or rethink it?” This was the very good question posed in a special conference hosted by the Brookings Institution this …

« A First Look at Employment | Main In a recent macroblog post, we shared some results of a joint national survey that is an ongoing collaboration between the Atlanta Fed, Nick Bloom of Stanford University, and Steve Davis of the …

« Weighting the Wage Growth Tracker | Main One Friday morning each month at 8:30 is always an exciting time here at the Atlanta Fed. Why, you might ask? Because that’s when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) issues the …

« GDPNow’s Forecast: Why Did It Spike Recently? | Main ​ The Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker (WGT) has shown its usefulness as an indicator of labor market conditions, producing a better-fitting Phillips curve than other measures of wage growth. So …

« How Low Is the Unemployment Rate, Really? | Main If you felt whipsawed by GDPNow recently, it’s understandable. On February 1, the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model estimate of first-quarter real gross domestic product (GDP) growth surged from 4.2 percent …

« What Businesses Said about Tax Reform | Main In 2017, the unemployment rate averaged 4.4 percent. That’s quite low on a historical basis. In fact, it’s the lowest level since 2000, when unemployment averaged 4.0 percent. But does that mean …

« Financial Regulation: Fit for New Technologies? | Main Many folks are wondering what impact the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act—which was introduced in the House on November 2, 2017, and signed into law a few days before Christmas—will have on …

« Is Macroprudential Supervision Ready for the Future? | Main In a recent interview, the computer scientist Andrew Ng said, “Just as electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago, today I actually have a hard time thinking of an industry that …