This study quantifies the roles of national, region‐specific, and industry‐specific shocks in aggregate employment fluctuations in U.S. regions and industries. Variation among the growth rates of major regions and industries is decomposed into unobserved national, region‐, and industry‐specific components. The results reject the view that any heterogeneity in regional fluctuations is attributable to differences in industry composition. After controlling for industry mix effects, roughly 40% of the variance of the cyclical innovation in any region's growth rate is particular to that region. In addition, region‐specific shocks appear to propagate across regions over time.

This paper examines the responses of prices at different stages of production to monetary policy shocks. In aggregate price analysis, the VAR of Christiano et al. (1996a, 1996b) is used to identify the policy shock as the federal funds rate innovation and trace out the responses of prices. In disaggregate price analysis, the adjustment of prices is examined by comparing inflation before and after a recent policy tightening identified by Romer and Romer (1989, 1992). At early stages of production, a monetary tightening causes input prices to fall more rapidly and by a larger amount than output prices.

We develop models that take point forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) as inputs and produce estimates of survey-consistent term structures of expectations and uncertainty at arbitrary forecast horizons. Our models combine fixed-horizon and fixed-event forecasts, accommodating time-varying horizons and availability of survey data, as well as potential inefficiencies in survey forecasts. The estimated term structures of SPF-consistent expectations are comparable in quality to the published, widely used short-horizon forecasts. Our estimates of time-varying forecast uncertainty reflect historical variations in realized errors of SPF point forecasts, and generate fan charts with reliable coverage rates.

We propose a new model for measuring uncertainty and its effects on the economy, based on a large vector autoregression with stochastic volatility driven by common factors representing macroeconomic and financial uncertainty. The uncertainty measures reflect changes in both the conditional mean and volatility of the variables, and their impact on the economy can be assessed within the same framework. Estimates with U.S. data show substantial commonality in uncertainty, with sizable effects of uncertainty on key macroeconomic and financial variables. However, historical decompositions show a limited role of uncertainty shocks in macroeconomic fluctuations.

We estimate uncertainty measures for point forecasts obtained from survey data, pooling information embedded in observed forecast errors for different forecast horizons. To track time-varying uncertainty in the associated forecast errors, we derive a multiple-horizon specification of stochastic volatility. We apply our method to forecasts for various macroeconomic variables from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. Compared to simple variance approaches, our stochastic volatility model improves the accuracy of uncertainty measures for survey forecasts.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to enormous data movements that strongly affect parameters and forecasts from standard Bayesian vector autoregressions (BVARs). To address these issues, we propose BVAR models with outlier-augmented stochastic volatility (SV) that combine transitory and persistent changes in volatility. The resulting density forecasts are much less sensitive to outliers in the data than standard BVARs. Predictive Bayes factors indicate that our outlier-augmented SV model provides the best fit for the pandemic period, as well as for earlier subsamples of high volatility. In historical forecasting, outlier-augmented SV schemes fare at least as well as a conventional SV model.