Economic Letter

The incidence of involuntary part-time work surged during the Great Recession and has stayed unusually high during the recovery. This may reflect more labor market slack than is captured by the unemployment rate alone. Analysis across states and over time indicates that a substantial part of the increase is related to the business cycle. However, structural factors such as changes in industry composition, population demographics, and labor costs have also contributed. This suggests that involuntary part-time work may remain significantly above its pre-recession level as the labor market continues to recover.

Events of the past decade have refocused attention on the potential contributions of monetary policy and macroprudential approaches to fostering financial stability. However, monetary policy is poorly suited for dealing with financial stability concerns. Instead, given the scarcity of explicit macroprudential tools in the United States, microprudential regulations and supervision are used to achieve macroprudential goals. The following is adapted from a presentation by the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco to the Symposium on Asian Banking and Finance in Singapore May 28.

The U.S. economy is on solid footing. The labor market is nearing full employment, and inflation should move back toward the Federal Open Market Committee’s target. A likely gradual removal of highly accommodative monetary policy could begin at any upcoming FOMC meeting. However, the exact timing will be driven by the incoming data. The following is adapted from a presentation by the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco to the New York Association for Business Economics in New York on May 12.

The official estimate of real GDP growth for the first three months of 2015 was shockingly weak. However, such estimates in the past appear to have understated first-quarter growth fairly consistently, even though they are adjusted to try to account for seasonal patterns. Applying a second round of seasonal adjustment corrects this residual seasonality. After this correction, aggregate output grew much faster in the first quarter than reported.

The dilemma of central bank independence has been around a long time. Past attempts to solve it through an operational mandate such as the gold standard have proven ineffective. The alternative approach of achieving economic goals through reliance on a fixed policy rule also poses practical challenges. A more promising path is to enhance accountability and transparency within an existing goal mandate framework. The following is adapted from a presentation by the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco to Chapman University in Orange, California, on May 1.

Inflation targeting is often considered the most appropriate monetary policy framework for central banks seeking price stability. While a target can help stabilize inflation, the implications for a country’s growth are less clear. Advanced economies experienced higher economic growth immediately following the transition to inflation targeting. However, developing economies experienced only modest gains that were close to their trend growth. One explanation is that transitioning to a low-inflation regime can be more costly for less stable countries that have higher inflation expectations and less credible policies.

The 2006 health-care reform in Massachusetts relied heavily on the private insurance market. Recent evidence shows that the reform boosted payments to physicians from private insurers by 13% relative to other areas. This increase began immediately before the reform became law, suggesting that insurers raised payments in anticipation of the change. The reform may have also caused the state’s insurance premiums to fall. Overall, evidence suggests that the Massachusetts health-care reform shifted dollars away from insurers and towards providers and consumers.

Financial market prices contain valuable information about investors’ views regarding future interest rates, inflation, and other economic variables. However, such market-based expectations can be hard to interpret because changes in risk and liquidity premiums also affect asset prices. In practice, policymakers should be cautious in relying on the expectations information in market prices.

Based on surveys of professional forecasters, expectations for price inflation 5 to 10 years ahead have edged down over the past few years. This decline seems to be primarily driven by revised expectations from forecasters who overestimated inflation in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Currently, the median survey-based expectation for long-term inflation is close to its pre-recession level and appears well anchored at the Fed’s 2% longer-run inflation objective.

Every month, millions of workers search for new jobs although they already have one. About one-tenth of these searchers switch employers in the following month. However, most of the job switchers in the United States never reported having looked for a job. This implies that, rather than those workers finding jobs, the jobs actually found them.