The conventional wisdom that homeownership is very risky ignores the fact that the alternative, renting, is also risky. Owning a house provides a hedge against fluctuations in housing costs, but in turn introduces asset price risk. In a simple model of tenure choice with endogenous house prices,...

Recent papers have questioned the accuracy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' methodology for measuring rent increases and changes in implicit rents for owner-occupied housing. We compare the BLS estimates of increases in rents and owner-occupied housing costs to regression-based estimates using...

Is there a local economic impact of immigration? Immigration pushes up rents and housing values in destination cities. The positive association of rent growth and immigrant inflows is pervasive in time series for all metropolitan areas. The author uses instrumental variables based on a...

Two often-divergent U.S. GDP estimates are available, a widely-used expenditure-side version GDPE, and a much less widely-used income-side version GDI . The authors propose and explore a "forecast combination" approach to combining them. They then put the theory to work, producing a superior...

Presented by Charles I. Plosser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Lafayette College Policy Studies Program, Farinon College Center, Lafayette College, Easton, PA, September 29, 2009

Inference about common international stochastic trends and interest rates is gained using a small open economy model, data from seven developed countries, and Bayesian methods. Shocks to these common factors explain up to 17 percent of the variability of output in several economies....

We provide a new and superior measure of U.S. GDP, obtained by applying optimal signal-extraction techniques to the (noisy) expenditure-side and income-side estimates. Its properties -- particularly as regards serial correlation -- differ markedly from those of the standard expenditure-side...

Presented by Charles I. Plosser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Fed Policy Forum: Policy Lessons from the Economic and Financial Crisis, December 4, 2009

Presented by Charles I. Plosser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Distinguished Speaker Series, University of Chicago Booth School of Business, March 31, 2009

Presented by Charles I. Plosser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, for the Inaugural Conference of the Society for Financial Econometrics, New York University Stern School of Business, New York, NY, June 5, 2008