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Session 20: Housing in the CPI: What are We Measuring?
Presentations
Joseph Carson slide show (PDF, 93 K)
Charles Steindel, Owner's equivalent rent and the cost of living (PDF, 12 K)
David Johnson's slide show (PDF, 1.04 MB)
Links of Interest
CPI Page at the Bureau of Labor Statistics
Speakers
Joseph Carson
Senior Vice President
Alliance Capital
Mr. Carson joined Alliance Capital in 2001. He oversees Alliance Fixed Income’s economic analysis team and has primary responsibility for the economic and interest-rate analysis of the United States. Mr. Carson has worked in government, industry and finance for more than 25 years. In his most recent role, he was Chief Economist of the Americas for UBS Warburg, where he was primarily responsible for forecasting the US economy and interest rates. Between 1996 and 1999, Mr. Carson was Chief US Economist at Deutsche Bank. While there, he was named to the Institutional Investor Fixed-Income All-Star Team. Mr. Carson began his professional career as a staff economist for the chief economist’s office in the Department of Commerce, where he was designated the department’s representative at the Council of Wage and Price Stability during President Carter’s voluntary-wage-and-price-guidelines program. In 1979, Mr. Carson joined General Motors Corporation as an analyst. He had a variety of roles at GM, including chief forecaster for North America and chief analyst in charge of making production recommendations for the truck group. Between 1981 and 1986, Mr. Carson served as vice president and senior economist for the Capital Markets Economics Group at Merrill Lynch. In 1986, Mr. Carson joined Chemical Bank; he later became its chief economist. Between 1992 and 1996, Mr. Carson served as chief economist at Dean Witter, where he sat on the investment-policy committee and on the stock-selection committee. Mr. Carson received his BA and MA from Youngstown State University and did his PhD coursework at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
David Johnson
Assistant Commissioner for Consumer Prices and Price Indexes
Bureau of Labor Statistics
David S. Johnson serves as the Assistant Commissioner for Consumer Prices and Price Indexes at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In that position he is responsible for all production, development, and dissemination activities in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) program. He also represents BLS on matters relating to price measurement generally and the CPI in particular.
Mr. Johnson has worked at BLS since 1990; first as a research economist in the Division of Price and Index Number Research, and recently as the Chief of the Division. In this capacity, he wrote several journal articles on such topics as the measure of consumption inequality and mobility, equivalence scale estimation, specification testing, and the well-being of children. He has published articles in the American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, The Review of Income and Wealth, and Monthly Labor Review.
During his tenure at BLS, he has been active in several interagency groups, such as the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. He is also active in the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, the International Association for Research on Income and Wealth, and the Ottawa Group on Price Indexes.
Mr. Johnson has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota, and he received his Bachelors degree in mathematics and economics from the University of Puget Sound. He has been an adjunct faculty for the Georgetown Public Policy Program, and taught economics at the University of Minnesota. He lives in Alexandria with his wife and their three children.
Charles Steindel
Senior Vice President
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Charles Steindel is a Senior Vice President in the Macroeconomic and Monetary Studies Function. He oversees the Group's analysis and forecasts of U.S. economic conditions. His research interests include consumer spending and saving and productivity growth. He has served as president of the Money Marketeers of New York University and the Forecasters Club of New York. He received his bachelor's degree from Emory University and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institure of Technology.
His fields of interest include Chain weighting measuring gdp, Consumer behavior, Cycle capital spending balance sheet, Growth and Productivity, Inflation estimates productivity growth, Investment, Manufacturing, Private saving, Productivity growth, Saving, Saving economic growth, Stock market consumption, and Tax rebate.
