Presentation by Eric S. Rosengren, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, for “Rethinking Central Banking” Conference, Washington, D.C., October 10, 2010

We present new evidence on the relationship between health behaviors and experimental measures of risk and time preferences and introduce evidence that perceived control — a measure incorporated from the health psychology literature — is a stronger and more consistent predictor of health...

In the United States, 15 percent of households change residence in a given year. This result is based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics on gross flows within and between the two segments of the housing market — renter-occupied properties and owner-occupied properties. The gross...

This paper examines the implications of changing the expectations assumption that is embedded in nearly all current macroeconomic models. The paper substitutes measured or "real" expectations for rational expectations in an array of standard macroeconomic relationships, as well as in a DSGE...

Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this paper examines the flow of U.S. households within and between two distinct segments of the housing market — renter-occupied properties and owner-occupied properties. The paper provides relevant empirical moments for microfounded models...

Using U.S. real-time data, we show that changes in the unemployment rate unexplained by Okun's Law have significant predictive power for GDP data revisions. A positive (negative) error in Okun's Law in real time implies that GDP will be later revised to show less (more) growth than initially...

Quantification of operational risk has received increased attention with the inclusion of an explicit capital charge for operational risk under the new Basle proposal. The proposal provides significant flexibility for banks to use internal models to estimate their operational risk, and the...

We designed and fielded an experimental module in the American Life Panel (ALP) where we ask individuals to report the number of their purchases and the amount paid by debit cards, cash, credit cards, and personal checks. The design of the experiment features several stages of randomization....

We develop a matching model of foreign direct investment to study how multinational firms choose between greenfield investment, acquisitions, and joint ownership. Firms must invest in a continuum of tasks to bring a product to market. Each firm possesses a core competency in the task space, but...

Economists often expect unemployment insurance (UI) benefits to elevate unemployment rates because recipients may choose to remain unemployed in order to continue receiving benefits, instead of accepting a job or dropping out of the labor force. This paper uses individual data from the Current...