Odd Lots - What Really Happens at a Fed Research Conference

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

Every year, regional Federal Reserve banks host some of the most substantive — and under-the-radar — events in the central banking world: research conferences. Behind the formal papers and dense macro models, this is where much of the Fed’s intellectual groundwork for monetary policy first starts to take shape. On this episode, we take you inside the Boston Fed's 69th annual Economic Conference to hear what the economists are actually debating, how they choose the questions that matter most, and what happens when the evidence — or egos — clash. Along the way, we talk to Fed researchers, outside academics, and Boston Fed President Susan Collins about how this kind of work influences policy in the real world. Watch all the presentations at the Boston Fed's website Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The next paper is going presented by Omar Barbiero. U.S. firm's exposure to import tariffs a comparison of the 2019 and 2025 episodes. Can I ask a personal question? When you present a paper like this at a research conference, like this Boston Fed one, So you get nervous, and then I guess adjacent to that, like, what's the best outcome for you when you present the paper? And what's the sort of nightmare scenario?

Would it be someone like finding some fundamental error in the methodology and like standing up in the middle of the conference and being like, there's a serious problem here? Yeah. I mean, many, many nightmare scenarios. Just clicking randomly and then we went. Okay. All right. I would say the worst thing that can happen is that you just say something wrong that sounds dishonest almost. Like you're trying to hide something.

Like there's clearly a data flaw and then you don't highlight it or you don't, you say in public, no, no, this is not a problem. And everybody knows. No, no, it's a problem. I think the profession is built on trust. And if you lose that trust, it's quite bad. That's Omar Barbiero, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. He's getting ready to stand up in front of a room full of other economists, journalists, academics, and his employer, and present a research paper tracking the exposure of U.S. businesses to import tariffs.

This is a paper written jointly with Slavic, Hillary and Alvaro, who are there, There happened to be in the room our excellent research assistants, Sophie and Lilia, also who helped us with this paper. We wrote it for the conference. It's still quite preliminary and therefore we really value your comments on this. How many individual pieces of data would you say were involved in this particular study? Okay, product code, they were around 400,000, I would say. and then you have to multiply that by many different countries. And so you have to keep track of that matrix.

The supply chain data set was also quite fun because it's kind of a network of companies and it gets big very, very fast, and you have to track it over time. I have to say, I mean, we have excellent, I mean, I have excellent co-authors, we have excellent research system, we have excellent, you know, computing power.

Thank God that can help us with that. And I don't know. Hundreds of thousands, millions? Yes, millions. We are at the Boston Fed's annual flagship research conference. The 69th year of the event, and the theme for 2025 is, quote, the U.S. economy in a changing global landscape. So focusing on how things like terror. tariffs, geopolitical tensions, industrial policy, AI, etc., are reshaping U.S. growth, inflation,

and the overall financial system. Clearly, that is a very rich vein to mine for research. And the format is a classic central bank research conference. Economists and other researchers are invited to write a paper for the event. They're assigned an official discussant. And then they publicly present to a room full of their peers, while the audience gets a chance to ask questions or, sometimes critique. Yeah, you say it's a classic central bank research conference, but we've never

actually been to one. I don't think, right? It felt like a totally new environment. Yeah, it's true. We have gone to Jackson Hole for the past few years, which is probably the most famous Fed research conference, but it's famous because the Fed chair usually makes a speech and that gets all the attention. We've never actually been in the room at Jackson Hole where they discuss the research papers being presented because the Fed only allows a certain number of journalists into the room. The room. The room. Also, I think it's unfair Kansas City Fed gets to hold their conference in the most beautiful place on earth. Instead of Kansas City. In the middle of August. And then the Boston Fed, I mean, it's their choice, but the Boston Fed has theirs in Boston, which is lovely. We both had a

great time, but November. It was very cold. Well, the upshot is that this time we were actually in the proverbial room. So for the first time, we got to really experience and learn what an economic research conference actually is. Yeah, this is actually very key. Because if you're sort of like wonder, so okay, Jerome Powell says something about, you know, the expected relationship between tariffs and inflationary. But where did these ideas come from? Where are these assertions, predictions, and so forth? It comes from academic research. It comes from the research backing that up, these conferences are where the macro ideas sort of actually collide with real world data. Yeah, another way of thinking about it, it is where the first serious drafts

of tomorrow's policy debates are aired. And we're going to give you a front row seat to experience what those initial drafts and debates are actually like. Welcome to the Boston Fed 69th annual flagship economic conference. The research at the regional bank, at the board, or at the BIS, you do policy. By policy, we mean, you know, you advise your principles. In our case, that's Susan Collins, the presidency of the Boston Fed, preparations for the FOMC meeting, for public engagements. That is Egon Sikrischek. He's director of the research department at the Boston Fed, and he's the one who actually puts this event together. And he's Omar's boss. Yeah, and he's Omar's boss, right? He also gets to choose the broad theme of the conference.

We've lived in a particular global order, rules-based international system, globalizations, trade integrations. We just took those things for granted for decades. And we're now grappling with monumental change. And we lack models. We lack theoretical frameworks to understand these changes. You've heard many debates about this data is no good. This is the sausage. Don't eat it.

Right. then how does one go about it? So I think it's just really, I mean, it's an exciting time for researchers because we have great questions, but I think it also underscores of just how little we really know and how challenging it is then to make policy recommendations in the period of such change. You know, the way a conference like that comes together is, you know, we sit together, my team of researchers, we try to pick a topic that would obviously be, timely, relevant to policymakers, we confer with Susan and then so forth, we look around, you know, and so forth. So once we kind of zero in on what the topic is, we then have to identify the

contributors to this. We have a certain idea of what we want different sessions to be. Then we get either academics or, you know, contributors to write papers for this, but, you know, academics, researchers write what they want to write. So sometimes there's a bit of a, you know, say, you know, gentleman-like distance between the blurb and the ultimate paper that gets written. But that's right. We've always seen this. This is very, very standard. And, you know, the idea is then is to the discussants, the role of a discuss and then is to kind of bring that paper and provide some context and, you know, try to, you know, fit it into the general theme. So this particular conference, the theme has changed, right? And one of the

One of the things we keep saying, but I think it's true, is we are living through capital age history here. We have the tariffs from the Trump administration, the reversal globalization, new geopolitical risks, AI, all of it. Right. And we're also still trying to figure out stuff like what happened in relatively recent years. Why did inflation actually spike during the pandemic? We're also in this new era of industrial policy and we're trying to figure out what that means for the economy. If we actually want to do the stuff like make semiconductors or build small modular nuclear reactors, we have to have some idea of where we're going. And we try to really keep it, you know, I would say somewhat more accessible.

I would say a bit interdisciplinary. We try to reach a bit broader audience. Is somewhat a typical conference, you know, your typical economic research conference which feature slide after slide of equations, graphs. I'm laughing slightly because I saw some equations this morning and the speaker is like, oh, well, as you can see from this slide, and I'm thinking, I cannot see it. No, I can. Right, right.

So, you know, so this is, I would say this is very light on this. If you're, you know, this is super light on this and so forth, we urge authors to try to write something that's more, I would say, policy relevant, that touches that can be communicated and stuff, rather than very, very technical pieces, you know, that is what the academic journals tend to specialize. Hopefully it sparks an idea, it sparks a new paper. You know, it says, ah, you know what, this is an interesting result, but I have maybe better data to do that.

So let me actually, or there was a testable implication that somebody, you know, brought up. Let me see if I can flesh that out because I think I can provide some of it. That's how knowledge in conferences, you know, advances. It's a very organic, a bit of a messy type of affair. And, you know, to be honest, many times don't things don't, they don't pan out. You know, I have files and folders full of research ideas that, you know, never went anywhere. But you try. And if you want to get a sense of that process and the policy implications of some of this research,

take a listen to the first paper presented at the conference. It's by Shepnam Kalemli Oskine. She's the Schreiber family professor of economics over at Brown University. I love economists in their long title, the John Maynard-Cain's chair of the Ludwig Vind Macy's endowed seed at the university of, you know, whatever. Keynes chair at the Misi school would be an interesting mix. Anyway, here's Shepnam presenting her paper. It is called Global Networks, Risks, and the U.S. economy. You know, paper after paper, be realized. the issue with the conventional macro open economy view. What is this view?

This view takes US as a relatively closed economy because of the low trade shares, exports 10% of GDP, imports 14% of GDP. And that, of course, combines with the fact that US is governing the world in terms of dollar dominance and deep financial markets. And on top of that, US has an amazing central bank, as we are all here right now,

that Federal Reserve acts as a global lender of loss resort when things go south. The benchmark implication of this view is that U.S. has limited exposure to global risks. You would like to revisit the issue in terms of asking directly half sensitive the U.S. economy to global risks once we account for full global trade,

production and finance networks, really think about tradesoff and counterfactuals and basically revisit this issue that the fact that maybe your trade shares are long. We caught up with Shabnam after her presentation to better understand exactly what she's trying to do here. All right. So, yes, we found something different because we work with networks. And let me explain what that is.

When you say networks, again, the traditional view first going to think about, of course, the trade networks. Why? because the trade networks directly linked to supply chains, right? And we already realized, you know, it is, those are vulnerable. I mean, you know, shock after shock, starting with the pandemic, you know, told us that, yes, maybe kind of our final goods trade or just if I focus on manufacturing, not that big, but if I look at the supply chains, value chains, then U.S. is integrated to that.

And then that changes the things, because that means, Even in the aggregate number, you might not see that big of exports and imports. There might be indirect exposure through all those things. Because when you think a network, you know, you are linked through trade. This is now where we also add to the traditional view, but you also have to think about the financing, right? I mean, so the networks to us is trade networks. Yes, you know, countries buying and selling, sectors buying and selling, firms buying and selling from each other, but also financial networks. I mean, you know, investors, investing in companies in other countries.

You know, the supply chains, finance by different investors in other countries. And on top of that, of course, the production, right? I mean, you know, so a product right now is assembled in one country, design in another country, manufacturing in another country, with parts coming from many, many countries, and skills and knowledge also coming from many, many countries. So when you have this type of a comprehensive view of the network, global network, as trade, production, and finance, then I think U.S. becomes very very very much. very vulnerable to global shocks and global risks.

So you could see why this would be an important area of research for the Fed, right? Right. And the conventional thinking has always been that the U.S. is kind of insulated from global shocks because it's so big, because the dollar is so dominant. External factors, it's thought, don't really affect the U.S. economy so much. Right. And also, we don't actually export that much, relatively speaking. Right.

We import. So that's the conventional view. But if per Shepnam's research, the U.S. is in fact more exposed. to global shocks than previously thought, if it's more intertwined with the network of the global economy through second order effects, then policymakers should be aware of that, right? If it wasn't clear, this is an enormous body of work spanning several papers, hundreds of pages, all with many applications and scenarios. That is Aaron Flan. He's a principal economist at the Boston Fed, and he's also the discussant

for this particular paper. The discussant role is really interesting. Yeah, this was probably one of the most fascinating sort of dynamics, which I knew existed but didn't quite appreciate how it works. So basically, every presenter gets paired with an official discussant, whose job is just to interpret and critique, frankly, the paper for a wider audience. So those are my main comments. I do just want to emphasize that what SefNM is doing here is policy relevant research at its finest. It's our profession working at its finest for really answering these very timely questions

in ways that... Authors are very close to the paper, right? You wrote this, you know, details. And you can see in the presentations, right? They know inside out and stuff like that. So they provide a presentation. The role, really what a discussant does is sort of essentially, let me translate what the author does for the broader audience, right?

A good discussant's role is really to sort of reframe the paper, pull out key takeaways and then provide some constructive, you know, comments. But sometimes things get a little awkward. Definitely awkward, but, you know, everyone's still very polite. Still very polite, yes. But more on that after this break. I'm Francine Lacquhar, an award-winning journalist. And I've got a new podcast, leaders with Francine Lacqua from Bloomberg Podcasts.

I've interviewed everyone from Heads of State to fashion icons about the news of the moment. But I've always been curious, who are these people as leaders? I don't think there's one right way to be a leader. Make decisions. A poor decision. is always better than no decision. Listen to new episodes every other Monday. Follow leaders with Francine Lacroix, wherever you get your podcasts.

Let's go to another paper. This one is by Tomaso Manicelli. He's a professor of economics at Universita Bacconi. And his paper is called Supply Chain Uncertainty, Energy Prices and Inflation. And it is actually about one of our favorite topics, Joe, supply chains. No, that's right. Because that's exactly right. So supply chain disruptions can sort of change the state of the economy.

So the environment, that's our idea, where firms make production and pricing decisions, right? And so the key idea is that the state of the world in which firms operate, right, can change underlying. So as economists, we say the state of the economy change. even starting from potentially minor events along the supply chain. So we make the example of this apparently small episode, like in the Suez Canal two years ago, sort of a ship container shipping oil and other inputs got stuck for a few days. We remember it well.

Yeah, we remember about, yeah. But that was, the episode sort of got resolved. in a few days, but I didn't have the time to show the data, but then the effect on transportation disruptions along supply chains lasted for months. So the analogy here is, think of an airport, like a hub, okay, where a lot of flights, so how many airports function as hubs, okay, have many flights coming from different directions. And right, you can have a disruption like a single delay on a single flight in the hub, but then this propagates, you know, along the day and then across many different flights and

amplifying the delay downstream. A cascade effect. Yes. So at the heart of Thomas's research is the sort of very important question. Are supply chain disruptions real? Are they a real thing? or these simply manifestations or symptoms of excess demand may be caused by too much fiscal stimulus. Yeah. So after the pandemic, a lot of people criticize the government for handing out checks to people and businesses, helping supposedly to fan inflation. But actually, if small supply chain disruptions can reverberate for longer than previously thought through energy prices or whatever, then per Thomas's research, they can be a pretty important source of inflation. And the important thing is that it's not the size of the supply chain shock that matters.

It's the actual volatility itself, the uncertainty that matters for inflation. Right. So again, I think, you know, you can see why this would be of interest to policymakers. Even five years after the pandemic, we're still trying to figure out exactly what happened and we'll probably be researching that for years. Totally. Yes. So here in the, in our research, we implement. emphasize the interaction, so the complementarity between, you know, shocks to, let's say, the price of oil, okay, that typically central banks look at, right? But they have a typical attitude, let's say, in normal times. If there are oil shocks, yes, we should monitor that those shocks don't feed, are not too persistent, they don't feed onto inflation expectations and so on, but their attitude is typically, let's look through. Okay, this oil price, all price, oil prices.

jump around very much in the markets. But here we are saying even the same original, let's say oil price shocks or energy gas price shocks, they can have a very different amplified effects on inflation, depending on whether the state of supply chain is disrupted or not. So it's really the interact. So it's not really that we believe, that we emphasize supply chain shocks. We say typical supply shocks like oil shocks or gas price

shocks, they can get really amplified and in a very persistent way if the underlying conditions of supply chains are disrupted. So that that state of the economy should be monitored. And in those states of the world, the central bank should be very, very reactive, way more reactive to oil shocks or energy price shocks, then in periods where supply chain disruptions are minimal. So that's the basic thrust of the paper, and the data seemed to bear Tomaso's thesis out, but things got a little awkward when it was time for the discussion. Hi, I'm Ludwig Straub. I'm a professor of economics at Harvard. I'm a quantitative macroeconomist, so I try to build models that describe the macroeconomy

and can be used for policy analysis and forecast. I'm a discussant of a paper on supply chain uncertainty and energy shocks and how those two relate to the post-COVID inflation episode. Right. As Ludwig puts it, being a discussant is a pretty big commitment. And we should just mention here that neither the researchers nor the discussants are getting paid for their time. They're doing this for other reasons, obviously to contribute to policy. But there's another big motivation that we'll get into in a minute. So here's Ludwig. So not everybody has time and energy to do this. In my case, I love being at the Boston Fed. And I'm, close so so it's not a big travel uh to come here and uh yeah so i said yes and um you know about

a month before the conference you typically receive the paper and then you spend a significant amount of time i'd say maybe half a week a week um you know in your of your research time with the paper and trying to understand the ins and outs trying to understand the empirics the model and then hopefully give a balanced view of the paper during the discussion And from what we saw at the conference, it feels like discussants can have different styles. Some basically summarize the paper and explain why it's relevant. And others, others, you know, maybe pick it apart very critically. Here's Ludwig talking about the discussants.

Some tend to be more like what you just mentioned, more like the latter that, you know, pick apart papers and kind of come across as a little bit destructive rather than constructive. you know the last discuss in at the conference was a lot more constructive for example and would be you know building off the author's results and you know showing them what they could do next with the paper some are very very kind and just praise the results which i i tend to i tend to try to be somewhere in between you know i tend to shed some critical light on the author's results if that you know is something that i think helps understand the paper but it also want to be constructive and I want to be kind to the authors too. So, you know, you want to kind of

balance those two sides, I guess. And Ludwig did shed some critical light on Tommaso's research. Suggestions for improvement, right? Suggestions for improvement, right? That's a good way of putting it. So as the economy reopened, as we had ample fiscal stimulus, and I tend to think that that means we ran up a marginal cost curve, meaning, you know, costs went up just because of the there was a lot of demand, and so bottlenecks emerged, ports got clogged, and I think that alone can lead to an increase in what looks like supply chain issues, even though they're not really the root cause of things. Now, I still think this paper has a lot of merits to it, but, you know, I tend to think that not all that looks like an energy shock is really truly a shock rather

than just a consequence of increased demand. Tomaso also used the Baltic Dry Index as a proxy for shipping cost, which as anyone who has spent a bit of time on finance Twitter will tell you is an index that gets criticized a lot. Exactly. And then if it's just one episode in that time series, that's kind of responsible for some of the results, then I would worry about that. Now, I don't know if that's exactly what's going on, but I did play around a little bit and it was not as robust as I was maybe hoping it or they were maybe hoping. it to be. So Tracy, speaking of Twitter, you know, look, both you and I are used to getting criticism, right? But even if you're used to it, I think it would be pretty uncomfortable to have your work sort of publicly criticized by one of your peers in front of a big group of peers. Yeah, I would think so, too, although Tommaso actually seemed pretty fine with it. No, okay, so that you learn out of

experience through time, right, that you have to filter the reaction of the audience and get the good and the bad signals. So first of all, I had great comments, very useful. I both myself and my call-author are very happy. The discussion was fantastic. I know him. He's a fantastic researcher. He's one of the best macroeconomists. I admire his research. I was very happy that he was pleased with the paper. But also the audience had very interesting comments that now materially will be very useful for keeping up with the research. And again, Sometimes you get some more aggressive comments. But, you know, there is a sort of there is an interesting role type of dynamics that happens in academic conferences that you have to internalize.

Tracy, I really do. I want to go to one of those workshops that you hear about where the young student or the young professor, maybe someone applying for a job, they're presenting their paper. And then the old professor in the back of the. room sort of puts on a big show and humiliates them, bringing up all these points. That is a very interesting point because Tomaso says the days of older professors publicly humiliating younger students are pretty much over. That happens in sort of behind secret doors in a way. No, but especially as of late, the profession is discussing that a lot.

Yeah. So we now are becoming much more aware that the climate, especially in economics, much more than in other social sciences or hard sciences, that the climate during seminars, during presentations, especially within closed-door seminars, might be sort of not conducive for younger researchers to actually take risks and learn from the art. And so we are becoming way more mindful that it is very important to keep a, to keep a, civilized climate in research environments. Speaking of civilized climates, we should just mention that things can get pretty heated in the public discussion too.

Right. So this is also part of it where attendees get a chance to ask questions or often make their own points about the papers being questioned. Many statements in the form of a question. Yeah, lots of that. And things got a little, I don't want to say combative, but loud. Yeah, they were loud. things got kind of loud after a paper was presented on the idea of policy tradeoffs,

so tradeoffs between geopolitical risks and economic risks. Perhaps it's too early to tell. Standard models of the type that Shemnon talked about without the nominal rigidities would also predict optimal uniform tariffs that are very high, 20, 40 percent range. So the current environment looks pretty good. The voice you hear is Paul Antris. He is a professor at Harvard giving the keynote address on the, first day of the conference.

According to this models, we are in a sweet spot. I'm not so sure. Why? Because the standard models are models that I think have features that I think are not in line with many of the things that I see when I look at the data. His presentation, the evolving role of the United States in global value chains. It touched on some of the same areas that Shepnam had covered earlier. And the beauty of a conference like this is that she was sitting.

right in the audience, and she was able to weigh in right then and there. You just raised a couple issues, and then I realized maybe I wasn't clear during my presentation. I fully agree on the whole firm level and how the input-output data we have is kind of this sausage. But I would disagree that we do want to understand how the sausage made so that we can do better, right? The economists were fighting. Well, actually, I asked Shab Nem about this later, and here's what she said. Well, actually, I characterize that is a very healthy debate. And a little bit also, you know, the artifact of these conferences where you have 25 minutes

to present, right? So I didn't have that much time. And then, of course, because I didn't show the parts where we used the firm level data and more, you know, discipline the macro model with more, you know, micro-identified elasticity and all that. Joe, all of this raises the question of why economists choose to do this in the first place. And, you know, you spend a huge chunk of time writing a paper. You probably have a few research assistants that are working on it, and they could be doing something else.

And then it gets scrutinized in this very public way. Maybe you felt that I was speaking on you. I didn't mean to do that. Now, of course, I take your point. Let me just push back, though, in the sense that... Obviously, one of the motivations is the policy aspect. Economists, I think, many of them want to inform policy in an... accurate and useful way. That's pretty obvious. But there was also something that I didn't quite

realize peer review and publishing. People want to be published. Yeah, look, I get it. Believe me, I get it. Researchers, yes, they want to influence policy. Who doesn't. But they also want to get their papers rubber stamp by other economists and then published in the most prestigious academic journals. And so one thing I wondered is whether there's a tension between, you know, just from the economist's perspective, is there some sort of tension between the goal of writing a paper is actually useful for making better policy or just sort of maximizing your chances of getting into a peer-reviewed journal? Yeah, I think that is a very fair question. And Shepnam talked about that too. Yes. This is the story of my life. Because this is a very serious tension. And I'm hoping

we will make the best use of these times. Now, we are living. living in to change this. Because yes, unfortunately, academia publishing values very narrow research and very tightly defined, specialized research. Yeah. And that's why economists are in silos, right? There are labor economists. They are macroeconomists.

They are IO economists, international economists, finance economists. And generally, these groups don't talk to each other much and they just do one thing. But when you want to do policy-relevant research, you talk to policymakers. And then the minute you start talking to policymakers and spend time in policy institutions, you realize these problems don't come like that. Oh, here's a problem about, you know, laborers. I need labor economists. Here's a problem about, like, you know, financial markets.

I mean, the problem about mother-poses. The problems are linked. The problems are linked. And economics profession actually is capable of, you know, answering those questions. problems, creating solutions for those problems if, you know, these insights from these different subfields come together, which is, you know, what I try to do. And I'm hoping, you know, which kind of, you know, academic publishing, you know, doesn't value that much. But I, I'm, you know, I'm an optimist. I'm hopeful. I think these are the times people now coming together,

writing with each other more and, you know, realizing this more and more. So hopefully, you know, we'll go downward to a better pad on this. Yeah. So if everything you're saying is right, so that's awesome. I would encourage you to kind of, like, obviously you want to come in and give some numbers, but give us like versions of the model that shut down this down.

And you're telling me the real model itself generates a lot of things that are not in standard models. So I'm really excited and I'd like to see. And I feel like to agree. You can do the smoothing as little as you want. That's where the data is going to help you. You need data power. But you have to put this.

this in a macro model. I mean, otherwise, you are not going to go back to inflation, output, trade off, and all these post-sequences. You have to put it in the macro- 100% I agree with that. All right, I will step in here. We have an iron cage there, and I have things. We'll put that on a YouTube. I would have a day. You can get the news whenever you want it with Bloomberg News Now. I'm Amy Morris. And I'm Karen in Moscow here to tell you about our new on-demand news report, delivered right to your podcast feed. Bloomberg News Now is a short, minute audio report on the day's top stories. Episodes are published throughout the day with the latest

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You know, Joe, there was, in fact, one major policymaker in the room, along with everyone else, and that is Susan Collins. That's right. There are two prominent Susan Collins. This one is the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. And she was there the whole time sitting in the front row. Susan herself actually was an academic. She taught at Harvard and Georgetown and the University of Michigan. There are lots of themes going on.

I have to say that I'm struck by the sense that understanding some of the complexities may change traditional ways of thinking about things. So that's a theme that I'm hearing. So the first paper was really, if you. you account for the linkages through networks that include not only trade flows, but also financial flows, and across sectors and countries, not just through countries, but add the sector component in, we may historically, with simpler, more traditional models, have underestimated the potential for larger, more persistent effects of different kinds of shocks. And then similarly, the second paper had kind of a similar theme that when you really focus on some of the supply chain

connections, increases in uncertainty can make a shock have a bigger impact. So putting the different things, making those connections, that's complicated work. I'm really glad that we have experts who are digging in and able to explain them and present them for us and have us ask questions and try to understand them better. So Susan mentioned ideas, and one thing I'm very curious about is how the ideas being presented in these papers actually filter through into policy. Osmosis, right? Well, right. I'm sure there's some of that. But also, like, do you think Susan is taking the most interesting paper and attaching it

to an email and sending it off to Tom Barkin at the Richmond Fed and being like, you have to read this? I would. Hey, Tom. Here's something you might find interesting. Yeah. So there are lots of different ways. So sometimes, you know, sometimes we have the time to go to each other's conferences.

and it's hard, right, because there's a lot going on. So sometimes people, sometimes my colleagues will actually be sitting in and hear from themselves. Some of their research teams are often tuning in, whether in person or virtually. Our research teams talk to each other. They're very active relationships. They co-author papers. They're engaged in that way.

And certainly if they're things that are really informative for me, I will share them with colleagues in a variety of different ways. maybe not as much. Attach the paper. You know, we have a lot to read and to go through. I would try to distill why I'm really interested. But, you know, we're always looking for important ideas, trying to be better informed. That's something that's important to all of us. And again, thank you for joining us for the 69th conference. We're delighted to have on last year. So that was the Boston Fed's research conference, Joe. It was great. But before we go, should tell people how Omar's presentation went. Oh, yeah. So we started this episode talking to Boston

Fed economist Omar Barbiero. And I feel like he was under more pressure than most because he was presenting not just in front of his peers, but in front of his actual boss. Actually, multiple bosses because there's Susan Collins, but also Egon Zechreich. So his boss and his boss's boss. Yeah, and his was actually the last paper of the conference. I thought it went really well. Some interesting insights on that. Thank you very much. Basically what I have to say, I think it's an exciting effort. very impressive data collection and rich set of results. Tomaso.

I think it's a, it's a, it's a, the, the, the, the effort also is, um, it's very important and then. Great, this is really cool to see. Uh, okay, this is a, this is a great paper. Uh, and I fully agree with Andre that this is actually huge work. So you didn't even mention, but we are also now matching Panjiva to a larger set of, uh, for,

Hooray, that's a good outcome. And, you know, I should just mention, Joe, we've obviously been summarizing all these papers because we're trying to compress a day and a half of discussion into, I don't know, 40, 60 minutes. But all of these papers are available online at the Boston Fed's website. Totally. And if you want to actually see the conference itself, if this episode, if somehow this episode was not enough for you. Actually, the entire conference is on videos. You can see all of the presentations and the discussants. and so forth. It's all available online. But I'm so glad we went because I feel like I have a much better understanding of how policy actually develops, how research develops, and what economists are kind of aiming for.

Totally. So when we went to Boston, you know, in my mind, I was thinking that we were there to learn more about economics, which of course we did, and there were all kinds of interesting ideas on supply chains, inflation, all the stuff we talked about. But it was also, and I hadn't appreciated this. It was a sociology trip. Like we're learning about the sociology of how academic work works, the relationship between academic work and policy and stuff, which is just one of these things that, of course, intuitively is very important. But I don't think like anyone really thinks about. And when you think about like how economists could be under this sort of dual pressure of like, do I want to influence policy? And is there some cost if I'm focusing on maximizing total published output?

You can see some real interesting tensions that emerge in that process. Right. It's sort of a microcosm of academia, I guess, which we got to study for a day and a half. So I don't know, maybe next year we'll be in the room at Jackson Hole. We can hope. If anyone at the Kansas City Fed is listening. All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me at the Stowart. Big thanks to Susan Collins and the rest of the Boston Fed for inviting us to observe and participate in their conference. And once again, all the people who took the time to chat with us, we really appreciate them. You should go to the Boston Fed's website and really check out those papers and presentations. All of it. Excellent. Follow our producers,

Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armit, Dashobin, who actually joined us on the trip. He's at Dashbot. And Kail Brooks at Kail Brooks. For more Oddlots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash oddlots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord. Discord.g.g. slash oddlots. And if you enjoy Oddlots, if you want to send us on more sociological trips to research conferences, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely add free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and

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