Christopher J. Kurz

Christopher Kurz is the section chief at the Industrial Output section in the Division of Research and Statistics at the Federal Reserve Board. His responsibilities at the Board of Governors have ranged from forecasting industrial production and motor vehicle sales to coordinating the staff forecast of GDP. Kurz’s research interests are similarly broad and cover international trade, international finance, nontraditional data, and economic history. Research projects of Kurz’s have employed microdata to quantify the effects of international trade on employment volatility at the firm level and back-tested systemic risk measures using historical banking data. Over the past six years, Kurz has been working on the Federal Reserve Board’s Expanded Measurement Agenda (EMA). The EMA is an attempt to identify novel data sources and leverage new techniques that can be used to develop timely and accurate measures of economic activity that are relevant to the formation of monetary policy.