Peter Fuleky
Is Fed Liftoff a Big Deal?
By Peter Fuleky The Federal Reserve is poised to raise interest rates, but whether the Fed begins liftoff tomorrow or early in the New Year, the climb thereafter is likely to be gradual. Futures contracts predict a gentle ramping up of interest rates, with the federal funds rate hitting about 1.4 percent by the end […]
Read MoreGauging Home Affordability: The Challenge
By Peter Fuleky At a time of dwindling inventory and rising prices, housing affordability has once again become a hot topic in Hawaii. One way to quantify whether the typical single family home or condominium is “affordable” is to compare median sales prices to the value of a mortgage the median household income could support. […]
Read MoreAre We in a Low-Growth World?
By Peter Fuleky The economic rebound from the bottom of the Great Recession was less vigorous than post-recession rallies of the past. Notwithstanding some recent pickup of momentum in the US, output growth in developed countries has continued to remain relatively subdued. But should we expect to see any faster growth going forward? Two prominent […]
Read MoreThe UHERO Dashboard Project | Flying to Hawaii: Comparing the Cost and Frequency Across States
By James Jones and Peter Fuleky The latest installment in the UHERO dashboard project is packed with information on the cost of travel to Hawaii from the US mainland. The visitor industry is one of Hawaii’s largest, and more than 60% of all visitors to the state come from the US mainland. In this dashboard […]
Read MoreNow and Later: The Impact of the Government Shutdown
By Peter Fuleky There are about 34,000 civilian federal jobs in Hawaii, a fraction of which were deemed essential and have therefore not been furloughed. Many of the 18,000 Department of Defense employees were ordered back on the job after the first week of the shutdown, and they are expected to be paid on time. […]
Read MoreCommon correlated effects and international risk sharing
Correct assessment of consumption risk and its international diversification has important policy implications. However, existing studies of international risk sharing rely on the unrealistic assumptions that all economies are characterized by symmetric preferences and uniform transmission of global shocks. We relax these homogeneity constraints and compare our proposed approach with the conventional ones using a […]
Read MoreEstimating Demand Elasticities in Non-Stationary Panels: The Case of Hawai‘i Tourism
It is natural to turn to the richness of panel data to improve the precision of estimated tourism demand elasticities. However, the likely presence of common shocks shared across the underlying macroeconomic variables and across regions in the panel has so far been neglected in the tourism literature. We deal with the e ffects of cross-sectional […]
Read MoreForecasting with Mixed Frequency Factor Models in the Presence of Common Trends
We analyze the forecasting performance of small mixed frequency factor models when the observed variables share stochastic trends. The indicators are observed at various frequencies and are tied together by cointegration so that valuable high frequency information is passed to low frequency series through the common factors. Diff erencing the data breaks the cointegrating link among […]
Read MoreAre lodging costs starting to tame the tourist boom?
The latest visitor highlights from the Hawaii Tourism Authority (HTA) show that both visitor arrivals and spending continued to increase through the first quarter of 2013, albeit at a slower rate than last year. However visitors to the state appear to be booking shorter trips and spending less at local shops, perhaps in response to […]
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