Research

Research projects and explorations.

• What If? What the Federal Reserve’s Macroeconomic Model Says About Alternative Recent Histories The Federal Reserve Board’s FRB/US model made to reproduce recent history exactly, then run with one thing changed: a Recovery Act twice as large, no 2017 tax cuts, a smaller American Rescue Plan, a Fed that started raising rates in 2021, no energy and food price shock from the invasion of Ukraine, no data center boom (with a switch for each assumption), or no tariffs in 2025 and 2026. Simulations run and written up by Claude under my direction.
• AI-Generated Economics Papers: An Experiment Can an AI do economic research largely on its own? Five full papers produced by Claude from a brief prompt, with the system that made them explained, a non-working copy of its request form, and every paper’s files. Experimental and unverified.
• Are Markets Underconfident in Predicting the Fed? Every FOMC meeting since 1994, the probability the fed funds futures market put on the decision two business days earlier, and what the Committee did — sortable and filterable, with the write-up behind it. The market almost never misses the direction and often misses the size. Researched and written by Claude under my direction.
• Who Moved on the FOMC: The 2023–24 to 2025–26 Realignment The whole Committee eased — but on the relative scale Bowman and Waller broke sharply dovish while a cluster of former doves moved the other way. A reading of the Fedspeak Tracker’s hawk–dove scores.
• The FOMC and the New Economy, 1993–2001 How FOMC participants used the three “new economy” arguments — productivity, a lower NAIRU, and globalization — and what they implied for rates.