Croushore to lead Philadelphia data research center

E. Claiborne Robins School of Business economics professor and Rigsby Fellow Dean Croushore has been named interim director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's new Real-Time Data Research Center.

Economists at the Real-Time Data Research Center, part of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's Research Department, act as experts on real-time macroeconomic data, macroeconomic forecasts and macroeconomic modeling, according to the center's Web site.

"Our ultimate goal," Croushore said, "is to become the kind of place that policymakers and Fed economists will go whenever there is an issue related to forecasting, or real-time data or data revisions."

The real-time data set shows information about the economy, such as inflation rates and interest rates and how those were originally released. Data produced by the government about the economy is initially released based on incomplete reports, Croushore said. But as the government receives more information that same data gets revised.

"What happened in economic research," Croushore said, "was that people were doing research on the past economy or talking about what the Fed did in the past based on all the revised data, not on what policymakers had at the time available to them."

Croushore said it is important to monetary policy and forecasting to know what those policymakers were thinking at the time. Research can be altered considerably if revised data is being used rather than the original data.

The center will help create collaborative research between experts on real-time data analysis and Federal Reserve economists who do not have the expertise in real-time data analysis. Croushore said the research Center will try to give economists at the Federal Reserve statistics and analyses they need to understand how much weight should be put on a variable, knowing that it will later be revised.

"I think what that will do ultimately is make policy a bit more conservative," Croushore said. "If they really understood the amount of uncertainty in those data it might make them keep policy more stable and only respond when you really have evidence that something is going wrong."

Croushore's research at the University of Richmond has focused on real-time data. A number of his research assistants have worked on the real-time data set, Croushore said,

Senior Kyle Bishop spent nine weeks this past summer collecting statistics for the real-time data set and will continue to do so this semester.

"The work that I did this summer is going to be used by any researcher," Bishop said. "When people are doing studies, the real-time data is becoming more and more important as people learn about real-time data and assess what people were looking at at the time and not how the data occurred. Those numbers can be very different."

Senior Richie Tolisano worked as a research assistant to Croushore for 15 weeks this summer. One project he worked on was the Livingston Survey, a data set maintained by the Real-Time Data Research Center.

"I was looking at stock price forecasts," Tolisano said. "And that's important because economists, if they can look at past data and know that it's accurate and know that it was corrected in a certain manner, they can better evaluate and forecast future trends and issues."

In the past five years, from the time when Croushore and his collaborators began publishing papers about real-time data, real-time data has changed the way journals look at papers that economic researchers submit. Croushore said in the past researchers had published papers that should have used real-time data, but had not because it was not available. Now, journals will reject papers when the authors have had the ability to use real-time data.

"It's really changed what people have had to do in research," Croushore said, "it makes it more complicated ... but the research is better."

Croushore started to work at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia in 1989 as an economist and later became vice-president of the Research Department before he came to the University of Richmond in 2003 as the Rigsby Fellow.

Contact reporter Laurie Guilmartin at laurie.guilmartin@richmond.edu.