Industry

After my Research Fellowship at the FDIC, I began working in Industry. During 2014-17, I was a Regional Economist in the US Regional Forecasting group at IHS Markit, formerly Global Insight. I managed the monthly economic forecasts for six states and their metropolitan areas. I also helped produce the annual revenue forecast for the City of Philadelphia in 2015, 2016, and 2017, published a monthly economic report for the City's Budget Director, and managed the transfer of forecasting code from AREMOS to EViews.

City of Philadelphia Revenue Forecast

Every January during 2015, 2016, and 2017, I helped produce the five-year revenue forecast for the City of Philadelphia. Forecasts for each revenue stream (e.g., wages/earnings, taxable sales, net profits) were presented to the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority (PICA) each year for scrutiny and rebuttal. Upon revision, our forecasts were sent to the Budget Director and the Department of Revenue.

State and Metropolitan Forecast

At IHS Markit, our approach to forecasting state and metropolitan economies involved a top-down bottom-up method in which state and local economies were modeled individually and then linked to a national system. This departed from a simple top-down approach using only shares of the national economy or a bottom-up approach not linked to a macroeconomic model. In generating the forecasts for Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and New Hampshire, I incorporated expected changes in hiring and production activity that were not captured by the behavioral relationships in the model. These forecasts were packaged, published, and sent to clients every month.