Accurate official estimates of Fed policymakers' preferred PCE inflation measure take months, and sometimes years, to become available. A small set of timelier indicators offers realtime power to “nowcast” PCE inflation. Those indicators provide as much accuracy as initial government...

We distinguish between three different ways of using real-time data to estimate forecasting equations and argue that the most frequently used approach should generally be avoided. The point is illustrated with a model that uses monthly observations of industrial production, employment, and...

Corporate tax reform has become a high-profile issue amid fears that firms are increasingly taking their headquarters and production facilities offshore and booking profits abroad. Adjustments to the tax system can help address these factors, though not without potentially introducing new issues

We develop a Social Distancing Index (SDI) based on a range of mobility metrics from Safegraph geolocation data, and validate the index with mobility data from Google and Unacast. We construct SDIs at the county, MSA, state and nationwide level, and link these measures to indicators of economic...

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) confirmed in November 2001 what many had long suspected - that the U.S. economy was in recession and had been since March 2001. Thus ended an economic expansion that had begun in March 1991, the longest in the NBER chronology that dates to the...