Developing distributional national accounts: first attempt to estimate a joint distribution for income and wealth for the euro area

In recent years, projects have sought to embed distributional aspects within national accounts, with household distributional information set to feature in the next System of National Accounts. There is growing emphasis on capturing all material dimensions of welfare—income, consumption, and wealth—at both macro and micro levels within a unified framework.

Reputation for Confidence

We model how a central bank communicates its noisy forecasts (forward guidance) while taking into account its own uncertainty (confidence) and the public’s perception of the bank’s uncertainty (reputation for confidence). This creates a mismatch between the public and central bank’s interpretation of the bank announcement which induces the bank to communicate with partial transparency and deliberate imprecision. Moreover, with higher confidence (lower reputation) announcements are more precise.

Congress has been dodging responsibility for tariffs for decades – now the Supreme Court will decide how far presidents can go alone

On Nov. 5, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear one of the most consequential trade cases in decades. The justices will decide whether a president can rely on a Cold War–era emergency law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, to impose sweeping import duties on a vast share of what the United States buys from abroad.

Banking on assumptions? How banks model deposit maturities

How do banks manage the behavioural maturity of non-maturing deposits (NMDs)? Using a rich and confidential dataset, we investigate how banks model deposit maturities based on internal assumptions. Although NMDs are contractually floating-rate liabilities with zero maturity, banks reallocate them across different maturity buckets using models that reflect past customer behaviour. Notably, only 20% of NMDs are treated as having zero maturity, while about 10% are assigned maturities beyond seven years. We assess whether these modelling assumptions align with banks’ deposit structures.

FEDS Paper: Declining Search Frictions, Unemployment, and Growth Revisited

Juan Carlos Córdoba, Anni T. Isojärvi, and Haoran LiThis paper revisits the conditions under which search models generate balanced growth paths (BGPs)—equilibria where unemployment, vacancies, and job flows remain steady as search frictions decline. Martellini and Menzio (2020) claim that such paths exist only when matches are “inspection goods” and match quality follows a Pareto distribution. We show that these conditions are sufficient but not necessary.

FEDS Paper: Do the Rich Really Save More? Answering an Old Question Using the SCF with Direct Measures of Lifetime Earnings and an Expanded Wealth Concept

Elizabeth Llanes, Jeffrey Thompson, and Alice Henriques VolzThe question of whether affluent households save at a higher rate than other parts of the distribution has been asked by economists on numerous occasions since the 1950s. It is standard in this research to define affluent, or “rich,” households as those with high lifetime earnings or income to better ground the empirical question in relevant theory.

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