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Guhan Venkatu |

Economist

Guhan Venkatu, Economist

Guhan Venkatu is an economist in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.  In this role, he contributes to research related to the Fourth Federal Reserve District’s economy. 

Mr. Venkatu is currently a member of the Ohio Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors.  He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Cleveland chapter of the National Association for Business Economics.

Mr. Venkatu joined the Bank in 1998 as a research assistant in the Research Department. In that position, he contributed to research on the measurement of inflation and inflation expectations. Before joining the Bank, Mr. Venkatu worked as a business analyst for the Claremont Technology Group.

He obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

  • Fed Publications
Title Date Publication Author(s) Type

 

 May, 2013 ; Economic Trends
Abstract: In January 2012, the Federal Open Market Committee announced that its long-run objective for inflation was 2 percent as measured by the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index. At the time, the PCE appeared to be moving toward this target. But since then, PCE-based measures have drifted down. Toward the end of 2011, the year-over-year change in the PCE was close to 3 percent, but by March, when the PCE fell 0.1 percent, the 12-month percent change in the index had fallen to just under 1 percent. This has prompted some FOMC participants to suggest recently that the Committee may need to act to address this disinflation.
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 May, 2013 ; Economic Trends
Abstract: Employment in Ohio has grown 2.7 percent since the start of the recovery (June 2009 to March 2013). Over the same period, national employment grew almost a percentage point more. Ohio’s employment growth to this point in the recovery puts it close to the middle of the distribution.
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 2013-05 ; Brent Meyer; Saeed Zaman; Economic Commentary
Abstract: The Median CPI is well-known as an accurate predictor of future inflation. But it's just one of many possible trimmed-mean inflation measures. Recent research compares these types of measures to see which tracks future inflation best. Not only does the Median CPI outperform other trims in predicting CPI inflation, it also does a better job of predicting PCE inflation, the FOMC's preferred measure, than the core PCE.
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 January, 2013 ; Economic Trends
Abstract: At the national level, the Labor Department tracks employment using two different surveys. One survey asks business establishments how many people they employ, while the other asks households how many individuals in the home have jobs. Differences in the sample size of each survey and the way they define employment can lead to different estimates for employment. The District’s unemployment rate should be interpreted with caution and we explain why.
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 October, 2012 ; Economic Trends
Abstract: Much of the increase in household debt last decade was driven by mortgage borrowing, which accounts for between 70 and 80 percent of U.S. household liabilities. Because this borrowing was driven by (and also drove) high home-price appreciation in some parts of the country, there is a clear geographic pattern to changes in credit usage over the last decade.
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 2012-14 ; Mark E Schweitzer; Economic Commentary
Abstract: Many adjustable rate mortgages in the United States are indexed to Libor. While the accuracy of this rate has recently been called into question, another issue affecting U.S. borrowers has become evident since the onset of the financial crisis. Specifically, many U.S. consumers with Libor-based loans may have been hit with substantially higher payments when their loans reset during the financial crisis than if those loans had been tied to a Treasury rate. We investigate several alternative reference rates for consumer loans and estimate their payment effects on a large sample of Libor-linked U.S. mortgages. We find that these alternatives would have delivered savings over Libor of about $25 to $45 per month and substantially more for mortgages that reset in October 2008.
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 September, 2012 Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, working paper no. 12-17 ; Brent Meyer; Working Papers
Abstract: This paper reinvestigates the performance of trimmed-mean inflation measures some 20 years since their inception, asking whether there is a particular trimmed-mean measure that dominates the median CPI. Unlike previous research, we evaluate the performance of symmetric and asymmetric trimmed-means using a well-known equality of prediction test. We find that there is a large swath of trimmed-means that have statistically indistinguishable performance. Also, while the swath of statistically similar trims changes slightly over different sample periods, it always includes the median CPI--an extreme trim that holds conceptual and computational advantages. We conclude with a simple forecasting exercise that highlights the advantage of the median CPI relative to other standard inflation measures.
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 July, 2012 ; Economic Trends
Abstract: The London interbank offered rate, or Libor, has served as a baseline for many bank-to-bank transactions in U.S. dollars since it was established in 1986. It has also increasingly become the basis for many financial transactions not occurring between banks. As such, recent revleations about Libor-fixing will affect these transactions, which include many U.S. mortgages.
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 2012-06 ; Timothy Dunne; Economic Commentary
Abstract: A region’s economic performance is closely linked to the skills and knowledge of its workforce. Using college attainment as a measure of workforce skills, we examine overall trends in higher education to get a sense of where Ohio stands relative to other states. The data reveal that Ohio has made some progress, especially in improving educational attainment in its younger workers. At the same time, Ohio lags in a number of other dimensions, in particular, in its overall level of college attainment and in attracting educated workers into the state.
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 April, 2012 ; Economic Trends
Abstract: For the 100 largest U.S. metro areas in 1970, two factors explain almost a third of the variation in median household income growth over the subsequent 40 years: the share of overall manufacturing employment in 1970 and the percentage of the population with bachelor's degrees in 1970.
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 December, 2011 ; Kyle Fee; Economic Trends
Abstract: Americans tend to be more mobile than others in the industrialized world. According to a recent study, the fraction of Americans who moved in 2005—roughly 12 percent—was about twice as high as the fraction that moved in most European countries outside of Northern Europe during the same time. While Americans’ annual mobility rates remain high by international standards, they appear to have trended down since at least 1980, though the reasons for this remain unclear.
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 October, 2011 ; Economic Trends
Abstract: Some U.S. states have seen their foreclosure rates fall since the housing bust and recession. Some have seen them rise. In the Fourth District, for example, foreclosure rates remain at or near historic highs. Which outcome a state will experience seems to have a lot to do with the kind of process that is used in the state to resolve foreclosures.
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 July, 2011 ; Economic Trends
Abstract: Home prices continue to trend down, both nationally and across Ohio. Indexes produced by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) show that prices in both the state and the nation declined by more than 5 percent from the first quarter of 2010 to the first quarter of 2011. As a result, Ohio’s home prices have fallen roughly to the levels that prevailed in 2000. This is unusual relative to the other states in the nation.
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 2011-07 ; Brent Meyer; Economic Commentary
Abstract: It has often been reported that different demographic groups show persistent differences in their inflation expectations. Some reasonable explanations have been suggested, but most have failed to fully explain these apparent differences. We argue that the demographic differences have been overstated by using the mean to describe differences across demographic groups. When we use the median to describe inflation expectations, we find little meaningful difference across demographic groups.
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 April, 2011 ; Economic Trends
Abstract: The Labor Department recently released updated employment estimates for U.S. metropolitan areas (MSAs). These revised data alter our assessment of how MSAs have fared throughout the recovery. Within the Fourth District, employment in every MSA except Cleveland is now thought to have grown more over the first 18 months of the recovery than was initially reported. Some of the revisions were relatively substantial.
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 2010-14 ; Economic Commentary
Abstract: Nearly one homeowner in ten is more than 90 days delinquent on his mortgage payment. Most of the homes under these mortgages are likely to be repossessed by lenders and resold, which has led some to call them a shadow inventory. How much these homes will affect the broader housing market depends on when they actually become available for sale and how long they remain on the market. Some analysts are concerned that a surge in the availability of repossessed or real-estate owned (REO) properties, or a persistently high level of them, could put downward pressure on prices. This could, in turn, induce additional foreclosures. This Commentary presents three possible scenarios for future REO inventory levels.
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 April 2009 ; Timothy Dunne; Economic Commentary
Abstract: As the foreclosure crisis deepens, increased attention is being paid to foreclosure statistics, which are often used to judge the intensity of foreclosure problems both within and across regions. However, these statistics need to be interpreted carefully; different foreclosure statistics embed different information, and making informative comparisons with various metrics requires understanding how each is constructed.
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 January 2009 ; Mark E Schweitzer; Economic Commentary
Abstract: Adjustable-rate mortgages have typically been tied to either of two indexes, one based on U.S. treasuries, the other on the London interbank offered rate, or Libor. The index is used to determine a mortgage’s new interest rate when it is reset, and up until recently, the choice would have made little difference. But since 2007, the rates on which the indexes are based have diverged sharply, and borrowers with Libor-based adjustable-rate mortgages are likely to pay more than they would have had their mortgages been tied to treasuries. Moreover, the proportion of Libor-based ARMs has increased significantly, especially for subprime loans.
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 April 29, 2008 ; Timothy Dunne; Economic Trends
Abstract: The U.S. housing market continued to be under considerable stress in the first quarter of 2008. Recent data show that building permits and housing starts are still falling, and mortgage delinquency rates rose again in the first quarter.
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 01.31.08 ; Timothy Dunne; Kyle Fee; Economic Trends
Abstract:
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 February 1, 2006 Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Economic Commentary ; Economic Commentary
Abstract: Cleveland’s employment growth has lagged the nation’s for nearly 15 years, a fact that is often blamed on the kinds of industries that are here—either the area is burdened with too much manufacturing, or it has failed to attract enough high-tech industries. But an analysis shows little support for that view.
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 May 15, 2004 Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Economic Commentary ; Mark E Schweitzer; Economic Commentary
Abstract: Two government surveys are used to gather information about employment in the U.S. economy, but the employment levels calculated from each seem to provide conflicting pictures of the labor market. The surveys are very different, but when the differences are taken into account and the survey results are compared with their respective business-cycle patterns, the conflict disappears.
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 November 2001 Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Economic Commentary ; Michael F Bryan; Economic Commentary
Abstract: That men and women occasionally see things differently is not a remarkable observation. But that the sexes could report vastly different perspectives on the rate at which prices are rising over a long period of time is astonishing. This Commentary describes the difference in inflation sentiment held by men and women—a puzzle that may hold the key to interpreting survey-based data on household inflation expectations.
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 October 15, 2001 Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Economic Commentary ; Michael F Bryan; Economic Commentary
Abstract: In this Commentary, we document that people report very different perceptions and predictions of inflation depending upon their income, education, age, race, and gender—a strange finding that may provide an important clue to understanding how to interpret survey data of inflation expectations.
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