# Economics

## Forecasting with logs

As an economist and all-around friend of strictly positive numbers I often use the log function. The natural logarithm of course, need I specify it? Apparently in certain spreadsheet software you do. In this note I just wanted to write down a couple of observations about how to generate mean or median forecasts of a variable $$y$$ given the model is fit in $$log(y)$$. Of course, I am going to borrow heavily from Rob Hyndman’s blog, where he coverse this.

## EPOP becomes Fedspeak

If I cannot send Adam Ozimek (at Modeled Behavior ) a Diet Pepsi, then the next best thing might be a chart about epop. epop is the term economists use to describe the employment-to-population ratio, a useful summary statistic about the labor market. Perhaps the summary statistic. Adam (and others) has been talking about epop as a key labor market statistic for years. It seems the Federal Reserve is catching on to the usage of the term epop (though many economists over there have been looking at the statistic for a long while too).

## Presentation: The dynamics of house prices and foreclosure rates across space and time

Updated May 28, 2019 I’m giving a seminar about my new working paper “What Happens in Vegas Doesn’t Always Stay in Vegas”“. The slides for the talk are posted below. I made the slides with R and the xaringan package. You can easily print the html to pdf with Chrome. The pdf version is below and available at this link. Long seminar slides .html or [.pdf](../../../../img/charts_may_22_2019/what happens in vegas preso long.

## What Happens in Vegas Doesn't Always Stay in Vegas

I’ve got a new working paper with Hua Kiefer (FDIC) and Diana Wei (OCC) that studies the dynamics of house prices and foreclosure rates across space and time. We estimate a model using a panel of state/quarters where nearby states influence one another. Link to paper (pdf): What Happens in Vegas Doesn’t Always Stay in Vegas Note Updated May 17, 2019 I’m giving a talk on this paper at the American Real Estate and Urban Economics National Conference later this month.

## Is the U.S. housing recovery over? Housing fluctuations across time and frequencies

The current economic expansion is set to enter its tenth year this summer. Assuming we make it to June, this will become the longest U.S. economic expansion in recorded history stretching back to the 19th century. But how is the housing market doing? After a decade of recovery housing market activity still has room for improvement, but trends in 2018 were negative. Home sales, housing construction and house price growth all declined in 2018.

## A Flatter Phillips Curve

Supply and demand, isoquants, indifference, the lists goes on. Economists love curves. One attracting extra attention these days is the Phillips curve. Last week I was in Boston for the annual meeting of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE). The overall conference was quite good, and certainly one of the highlights was a lunchtime speech by Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. You can find the speech here (pdf).

## U.S. housing supply and demand

In this post I want review some trends in U.S. housing supply and demand. Specifically I want to look at county level trends in population, housing supply (the total number of housing units) and house prices. We’ll uncover some interesting trends. Per usual we will make our graphics with R. Preparing the data required several steps that I will outline in a follow up post. For now we’ll just proceed with the data I’ve put together.