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Recent Advances in Reconfigurable Antennas at University of Technology Sydney

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• Published: 21 March 2018
• Volume 3 , pages 15–20, ( 2018 )

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• Peiyuan Qin 1 ,
• Shulin Chen 1 &
• Y. Jay Guo 1  

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This paper presents an overview of the recent advances in reconfigurable antennas for wireless communications at University of Technology Sydney. In particular, it reports our latest progress in this research field, including a multi-linear polarization reconfigurable antenna, a pattern reconfigurable antenna with multiple switchable beams, and a combined pattern and polarization reconfigurable antenna.

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A Survey on Beamwidth Reconfigurable Antennas

Reconfigurable Antennas for Advanced Wireless Communications: A Review

Reconfigurable Antennas and Their Applications

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Peiyuan Qin [corresponding author] received his B.S. degree in Electronic Engineering from Xidian University, Xi’an, China, in 2006, and a joint Ph.D. degree from Xidian University and Macquarie University, Australia, in electromagnetic fields and microwave technology in 2012.

From 2012 to 2015, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia. From 2015 to 2016, he was a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow/Lecturer with University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia. Since 2017, he is a Senior Lecturer with UTS. His research interests include reconfigurable antennas, phase shifters, reconfigurable reflectarrays, and MIMO communications.

Dr. Qin was awarded an Australia Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) in 2017. He was a recipient of the UTS Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in 2015 and CSIRO OCE Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2012. He won the international Macquarie University Research Excellence Scholarship in 2010 and was awarded the Vice-Chancellor’s Commendation for academic excellence by Macquarie University in 2012. One of his journal papers was selected as 2016 Computer Simulation Technology (CST) University Publication Award and he was selected as Finalist of the Best Paper Award in 2017 ISAP. He is currently severing the Associate Editor of IEEE Antennas andWireless Propagation Letters. (Email: [email protected])

Shulin Chen (S’16) was born in Hubei Province, China. He received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Fuzhou University, China, in 2012, and the M.S. degree in electromagnetic field and microwave technology from Xiamen University, China, in 2015. Since 2016, he has been working towards the Ph.D. degree in Engineering with the Global Big Data Technologies Centre (GBDTC), University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia.

His research interests include reconfigurable antennas, leaky-wave antennas, millimeter wave antennas, and adaptive array processing. He has authored or co-authored over 15 journal and conference papers. He was a finalist of ISAP 2017 best paper competition, and his paper was listed as an Honorary Mention in APS-URSI 2017.

Y. Jay Guo (Fellow’2014) received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Xidian University in 1982 and 1984, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree from Xi’an Jiaotong University in 1987, all in China. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Engineering and Technology, a Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of IET, and a member of the College of Experts of Australian Research Council (ARC). He has won a number of most prestigious Australian national awards, and was named one of the most influential engineers in Australia in 2014 and 2015. His research interests include antennas, mm-wave and THz communications and sensing systems as well as big data. He has published over 350 research papers and holds 22 patents in antennas and wireless systems.

Prof. Guo is a Distinguished Professor and the founding Director of Global Big Data Technologies Centre at University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia. Prior to this appointment in 2014, he served as a Director in CSIRO for over nine years, directing a number of ICT research portfolios. Before joining CSIRO, he held various senior leadership positions in Fujitsu, Siemens and NEC in the U.K.

Prof. Guo has chaired numerous international conferences. He was the International Advisory Committee Chair of IEEE VTC2017, General Chair of ISAP2015, iWAT2014 and WPMC’2014, and TPC Chair of 2010 IEEE WCNC, and 2012 and 2007 IEEE ISCIT. He served as a Guest Editor of special issues on “Antennas for Satellite Communications” and “Antennas and Propagation Aspects of 60-90 GHzWireless Communications,” both in IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, Special Issue on “Communications Challenges and Dynamics for Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles,” IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), and Special Issue on “5G for Mission Critical Machine Communications”, IEEE Network Magazine.

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Qin, P., Chen, S. & Guo, Y.J. Recent Advances in Reconfigurable Antennas at University of Technology Sydney. J. Commun. Inf. Netw. 3 , 15–20 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41650-018-0005-6

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Received : 15 December 2017

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s41650-018-0005-6

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2023 summer warmth unparalleled over the past 2,000 years

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Including an exceptionally warm Northern Hemisphere (NH) summer 1 ,2 , 2023 has been reported as the hottest year on record 3-5 . Contextualizing recent anthropogenic warming against past natural variability is nontrivial, however, because the sparse 19 th century meteorological records tend to be too warm 6 . Here, we combine observed and reconstructed June-August (JJA) surface air temperatures to show that 2023 was the warmest NH extra-tropical summer over the past 2000 years exceeding the 95% confidence range of natural climate variability by more than half a degree Celsius. Comparison of the 2023 JJA warming against the coldest reconstructed summer in 536 CE reveals a maximum range of pre-Anthropocene-to-2023 temperatures of 3.93°C. Although 2023 is consistent with a greenhouse gases-induced warming trend 7 that is amplified by an unfolding El Niño event 8 , this extreme emphasizes the urgency to implement international agreements for carbon emission reduction.

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New research aims to gauge brain power of the T. rex

In December 2022, Vanderbilt University neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel published a paper that caused an uproar in the dinosaur world.

After analyzing previous research on fossilized dinosaur brain cavities and the neuron counts of birds and other related living animals, Herculano-Houzel extrapolated that the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex may have had more than 3 billion neurons — more than a baboon.

As a result, she argued, the predators could have been smart enough to make and use tools and to form social cultures akin to those seen in present-day primates.

The original “Jurassic Park” film spooked audiences by imagining velociraptors smart enough to open doors. Herculano-Houzel’s paper described T. rex as essentially wily enough to sharpen their own shivs. The bold claims made headlines, and almost immediately attracted scrutiny and skepticism from paleontologists.

In a paper published Monday in “The Anatomical Record,” an international team of paleontologists, neuroscientists and behavioral scientists argue that Herculano-Houzel’s assumptions about brain cavity size and corresponding neuron counts were off-base.

True T. rex intelligence, the scientists say, was probably much closer to that of modern-day crocodiles than primates — a perfectly respectable amount of smarts for a therapod to have.

“What needs to be emphasized is that reptiles are certainly not as dim-witted as is commonly believed,” said Kai Caspar, a biologist at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and co-author of the paper. “So whereas there is no reason to assume that T. rex had primate-like habits, it was certainly a behaviorally sophisticated animal.”

Brain tissue doesn’t fossilize, and so researchers examine the shape and size of the brain cavity in fossilized dinosaur skulls to deduce what their brains may have been like.

In their analysis, the authors took issue with Herculano-Houzel’s assumption that dinosaur brains filled their skull cavities in a proportion similar to bird brains. Herculano-Houzel’s analysis posited that T. rex brains occupied most of their brain cavity, analogous to that of the modern-day ostrich.

But dinosaur brain cases more closely resemble those of modern-day reptiles like crocodiles, Caspar said. For animals like crocodiles, brain matter occupies only 30% to 50% of the brain cavity. Though brain size isn’t a perfect predictor of neuron numbers, a much smaller organ would have far fewer than the 3 billion neurons Herculano-Houzel projected.

“T. rex does come out as the biggest-brained big dinosaur we studied, and the biggest one not closely related to modern birds, but we couldn’t find the 2 to 3 billion neurons she found, even under our most generous estimates,” said co-author Thomas R. Holtz, Jr., a vertebrate paleontologist at University of Maryland, College Park.

What’s more, the research team argued, neuron counts aren’t an ideal indicator of an animal’s intelligence.

Giraffes have roughly the same number of neurons that crows and baboons have, Holtz pointed out, but they don’t use tools or display complex social behavior in the way those species do.

“Obviously in broad strokes you need more neurons to create more thoughts and memories and to solve problems,” Holtz said, but the sheer number of neurons an animal has can’t tell us how the animal will use them.

“Neuronal counts really are comparable to the storage capacity and active memory on your laptop, but cognition and behavior is more like the operating system,” he said. “Not all animal brains are running the same software.”

Based on CT scan reconstructions, the T. rex brain was probably “ a long tube that has very little in terms of the cortical expansion that you see in a primate or a modern bird,” said paleontologist Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

“The argument that a T. Rex would have been as intelligent as a primate — no. That makes no sense to me,” said Chiappe, who was not involved in the study.

Like many paleontologists, Chiappe and his colleagues at the Dinosaur Institute were skeptical of Herculano-Houzel’s original conclusions. The new paper is more consistent with previous understandings of dinosaur anatomy and intelligence, he said.

“I am delighted to see that my simple study using solid data published by paleontologists opened the way for new studies,” Herculano-Houzel said in an email. “Readers should analyze the evidence and draw their own conclusions. That’s what science is about!”

When thinking about the inner life of T. rex, the most important takeaway is that reptilian intelligence is in fact more sophisticated than our species often assumes, scientists said.

“These animals engage in play, are capable of being trained, and even show excitement when they see their owners,” Holtz said. “What we found doesn’t mean that T. rex was a mindless automaton; but neither was it going to organize a Triceratops rodeo or pass down stories of the duckbill that was THAT BIG but got away.”

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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New treatment could reverse hair loss caused by an autoimmune skin disease

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Researchers at MIT, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School have developed a potential new treatment for alopecia areata, an autoimmune disorder that causes hair loss and affects people of all ages, including children.

For most patients with this type of hair loss, there is no effective treatment. The team developed a microneedle patch that can be painlessly applied to the scalp and releases drugs that help to rebalance the immune response at the site, halting the autoimmune attack.

In a study of mice, the researchers found that this treatment allowed hair to regrow and dramatically reduced inflammation at the treatment site, while avoiding systemic immune effects elsewhere in the body. This strategy could also be adapted to treat other autoimmune skin diseases such as vitiligo, atopic dermatitis, and psoriasis, the researchers say.

“This innovative approach marks a paradigm shift. Rather than suppressing the immune system, we’re now focusing on regulating it precisely at the site of antigen encounter to generate immune tolerance,” says Natalie Artzi, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and an associate faculty member at the Wyss Institute of Harvard University.

Artzi and Jamil R. Azzi, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, are the senior authors of the new study , which appears in the journal Advanced Materials . Nour Younis, a Brigham and Women’s postdoc, and Nuria Puigmal, a Brigham and Women’s postdoc and former MIT research affiliate, are the lead authors of the paper.

The researchers are now working on launching a company to further develop the technology, led by Puigmal, who was recently awarded a Harvard Business School Blavatnik Fellowship.

Direct delivery

Alopecia areata, which affects more than 6 million Americans, occurs when the body’s own T cells attack hair follicles, leading the hair to fall out. The only treatment available to most patients — injections of immunosuppressant steroids into the scalp — is painful and patients often can’t tolerate it.

Some patients with alopecia areata and other autoimmune skin diseases can also be treated with immunosuppressant drugs that are given orally, but these drugs lead to widespread suppression of the immune system, which can have adverse side effects.

“This approach silences the entire immune system, offering relief from inflammation symptoms but leading to frequent recurrences. Moreover, it increases susceptibility to infections, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer,” Artzi says.

A few years ago, at a working group meeting in Washington, Artzi happened to be seated next to Azzi (the seating was alphabetical), an immunologist and transplant physican who was seeking new ways to deliver drugs directly to the skin to treat skin-related diseases.

Their conversation led to a new collaboration, and the two labs joined forces to work on a microneedle patch to deliver drugs to the skin. In 2021, they reported that such a patch can be used to prevent rejection following skin transplant. In the new study, they began applying this approach to autoimmune skin disorders.

“The skin is the only organ in our body that we can see and touch, and yet when it comes to drug delivery to the skin, we revert to systemic administration. We saw great potential in utilizing the microneedle patch to reprogram the immune system locally,” Azzi says.

The microneedle patches used in this study are made from hyaluronic acid crosslinked with polyethylene glycol (PEG), both of which are biocompatible and commonly used in medical applications. With this delivery method, drugs can pass through the tough outer layer of the epidermis, which can’t be penetrated by creams applied to the skin.

“This polymer formulation allows us to create highly durable needles capable of effectively penetrating the skin. Additionally, it gives us the flexibility to incorporate any desired drug,” Artzi says. For this study, the researchers loaded the patches with a combination of the cytokines IL-2 and CCL-22. Together, these immune molecules help to recruit regulatory T cells, which proliferate and help to tamp down inflammation. These cells also help the immune system learn to recognize that hair follicles are not foreign antigens, so that it will stop attacking them.

Hair regrowth

The researchers found that mice treated with this patch every other day for three weeks had many more regulatory T cells present at the site, along with a reduction in inflammation. Hair was able to regrow at those sites, and this growth was maintained for several weeks after the treatment ended. In these mice, there were no changes in the levels of regulatory T cells in the spleen or lymph nodes, suggesting that the treatment affected only the site where the patch was applied.

In another set of experiments, the researchers grafted human skin onto mice with a humanized immune system. In these mice, the microneedle treatment also induced proliferation of regulatory T cells and a reduction in inflammation.

The researchers designed the microneedle patches so that after releasing their drug payload, they can also collect samples that could be used to monitor the progress of the treatment. Hyaluronic acid causes the needles to swell about tenfold after entering the skin, which allows them to absorb interstitial fluid containing biomolecules and immune cells from the skin.

Following patch removal, researchers can analyze samples to measure levels of regulatory T cells and inflammation markers. This could prove valuable for monitoring future patients who may undergo this treatment.

The researchers now plan to further develop this approach for treating alopecia, and to expand into other autoimmune skin diseases.

The research was funded by the Ignite Fund and Shark Tank Fund awards from the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

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MIT researchers have developed microneedle patches that are capable of restoring hair growth in alopecia areata patients, reports Ernie Mundell for HealthDay . The team’s approach includes a, “patch containing myriad microneedles that is applied to the scalp,” writes Mundell. “It releases drugs to reset the immune system so it stops attacking follicles.” 

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The Commission on Cancer (CoC) has launched the 2024 Research Paper Competition for physicians in training to encourage oncologic research in support of its mission. Categories for submission are clinical research and basic science. The first-place winners will receive a $1,000 honorarium plus an opportunity to present their papers at the CoC’s Plenary Session during Clinical Congress 2024, October 19–22 in San Francisco, California. Second- and third-place winners will each receive $500.

More information on eligibility, requirements, and awards is available on the CoC website . Send submissions to Melissa Leeb at [email protected] by July 9 .

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Places with more college graduates tend to foster better lifestyle habits overall, research finds

by Christy DeSmith, Harvard Gazette

Having more education has long been linked to better individual health. But those benefits are also contagious, say the co-authors of a new working paper .

"It's not just that the individuals who have more years of education are in better health," said David M. Cutler, Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics. "It's that even people with fewer years of education—for example, people with just a high school degree—are in better health when they live around people who have more years of education."

The paper examines why cities with more college graduates see lower mortality rates for residents overall. It's not due to spatial sorting, or the practice of relocating to live amidst those with similar habits. Nor did the researchers find a particularly strong correlation with factors like clean air, low crime, and high-quality health care infrastructure. Instead, most of the explanation involves rates of smoking, physical activity, and obesity.

The pattern has everything to do with a community's common culture, said co-author Edward L. Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics and chair of the Department of Economics. "Smoking, for example, is a social activity," he said. "Fundamentally, being around other smokers is fine if you're smoking, but it's usually pretty unpleasant if you're not smoking."

Glaeser, an urban economist and author of "Triumph of the City" (2011), has spent decades studying how varying education levels play out across U.S. society. One well-established finding concerns economic resilience . "If you ask yourself, which American cities managed to turn themselves around after the very difficult period of the 1970s and 1980s? Educated places like Seattle or Boston did. Less-educated places did not," Glaeser said.

For his part, Cutler, a health economist , spent the last few decades parsing the strong link between education and individual health outcomes. All the while he kept collaborating with Glaeser to explore obesity , smoking , and other health-related behaviors at the community level. The economists revisited these issues in the 2021 book "Survival of the City: The Future of Urban Life in an Age of Isolation."

Also collaborating on the new paper were Jacob H. Bor, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, and Ljubica Ristovska, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale. Together, the researchers rejected the spatial sorting explanation with the help of data from the University of Michigan's Health and Retirement Study .

Similar analysis was done using data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of young women and men. Results showed that unhealthy people of all ages relocate more frequently than healthy ones. But both groups settle in areas with roughly equal levels of human capital (defined here as a population's years of education).

The team analyzed a variety of information sources—from county-level homicide statistics to regional estimates of air quality and a federal measure of hospital quality —to see whether mortality differentials are due to area amenities. "We estimate that at most 17% percent of the human capital externality on health is due to these external factors, driven largely by greater use of preventative care," the co-authors wrote.

Instead, the majority of the correlation between human capital and area health—at least 60 percent—is explained by differences in health-related behaviors, the researchers found. Combining data from both the U.S. Census Bureau and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that every 10% increase in an area's share of college graduates was associated with an annual 7% decrease in all-cause mortality.

With additional data from the CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS), the researchers were able to probe connections between human capital and various health-related behaviors. Every 10% increase in an area's college graduates was associated with a 13% decrease in smoking, a 7% decrease in having no physical activity, and a 12% decrease in the probability of being very obese.

"It really opens up all these questions of how people form their beliefs," Cutler said.

The paper went deepest on smoking, given the wealth of historical numbers on cigarette initiation, cessation, and beliefs. CPS data showed that in cities where people have more years of education—New York City, Boston, or Seattle, for example—people are more likely to think that smoking is bad for you.

Residents of these cities are also likelier to support smoking regulations. For every 10% increase in bachelor's degrees, the probability of working at a place with a complete smoking ban increases by 2 percentage points.

Cutler and Glaeser were especially fascinated to find a growing connection over time between human capital and area health, especially between the years 1990 and 2010. As the correlation between individual education and behavior increased, they explained, the relationship between a community's education levels and its mortality rates slowly followed suit.

"Just look at people who were 70 in 2000," said Glaeser, who has observed a similar dynamic over the same period between human capital and earnings . "These people were 30 in 1960. A lot of people were smoking in 1960, and there wasn't nearly as strong of an education gradient as we saw 30 years later."

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Are Markups Driving the Ups and Downs of Inflation?

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FRBSF Economic Letter 2024-12 | May 13, 2024

How much impact have price markups for goods and services had on the recent surge and the subsequent decline of inflation? Since 2021, markups have risen substantially in a few industries such as motor vehicles and petroleum. However, aggregate markups—which are more relevant for overall inflation—have generally remained flat, in line with previous economic recoveries over the past three decades. These patterns suggest that markup fluctuations have not been a main driver of the ups and downs of inflation during the post-pandemic recovery.

In the recovery from the pandemic, U.S. inflation surged to a peak of over 7% in June 2022 and has since declined to 2.7% in March 2024, as measured by the 12-month change in the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index. What factors have been driving the ups and downs of inflation? Production costs are traditionally considered a main contributor, particularly costs stemming from fluctuations in demand for and supply of goods and services. As demand for their products rises, companies need to hire more workers and buy more intermediate goods, pushing up production costs. Supply chain disruptions can also push up the cost of production. Firms may pass on all or part of the cost increases to consumers by raising prices. Thus, an important theoretical linkage runs from cost increases to inflation. Likewise, decreases in costs should lead to disinflation.

Labor costs are an important factor of production costs and are often useful for gauging inflationary pressures. However, during the post-pandemic surge in inflation, nominal wages rose more slowly than prices, such that real labor costs were falling until early 2023. By contrast, disruptions to global supply chains pushed up intermediate goods costs, contributing to the surge in inflation (see, for example, Liu and Nguyen 2023). However, supply chains have more direct impacts on goods inflation than on services inflation, which also rose substantially.

In this Economic Letter , we consider another factor that might drive inflation fluctuations: changes in firms’ pricing power and markups. An increase in pricing power would be reflected in price-cost markups, leading to higher inflation; likewise, a decline in pricing power and markups could alleviate inflation pressures. We use industry-level measures of markups to trace their evolving impact on inflation during the current expansion. We find that markups rose substantially in some sectors, such as the motor vehicles industry. However, the aggregate markup across all sectors of the economy, which is more relevant for inflation, has stayed essentially flat during the post-pandemic recovery. This is broadly in line with patterns during previous business cycle recoveries. Overall, our analysis suggests that fluctuations in markups were not a main driver of the post-pandemic surge in inflation, nor of the recent disinflation that started in mid-2022.

Potential drivers of inflation: Production costs and markups

To support households and businesses during the pandemic, the Federal Reserve lowered the federal funds rate target to essentially zero, and the federal government provided large fiscal transfers and increased unemployment benefits. These policies boosted demand for goods and services, especially as the economy recovered from the depth of the pandemic.

The increase in overall demand, combined with supply shortages, boosted the costs of production, contributing to the surge in inflation during the post-pandemic recovery. Although labor costs account for a large part of firms’ total production costs, real labor costs were falling between early 2021 and mid-2022 such that the increases in prices outpaced those in nominal wages. This makes it unlikely that labor costs were driving the surge in inflation.

Instead, we focus on another potential alternative driver of inflation that resulted from firms’ ability to adjust prices, known as pricing power. As demand for goods surged early in the post-pandemic recovery, companies may have had a greater ability to raise their prices above their production costs, a gap known as markups. Following a sharp drop in spending at the height of the pandemic, people may have become eager to resume normal spending patterns and hence more tolerant to price increases than in the past. In fact, growth of nonfinancial corporate profits accelerated in the early part of the recovery (see Figure 1), suggesting that companies had increased pricing power. Some studies have pointed to the strong growth in nonfinancial corporate profits in 2021 as evidence that increased markups have contributed to inflation (see, for example, Weber and Wasmer 2023). However, the figure also shows that growth in corporate profits is typically volatile. Corporate profits tend to rise in the early stages of economic recoveries. Data for the current recovery show that the increase in corporate profits is not particularly pronounced compared with previous recoveries.

Figure 1 Profit growth for nonfinancial businesses

More importantly, corporate profits are an imperfect measure of a firm’s pricing power because several other factors can drive changes in profitability. For instance, much of the recent rise in corporate profits can be attributed to lower business taxes and higher subsidies from pandemic-related government support, as well as lower net interest payments due to monetary policy accommodation (Pallazzo 2023).

Instead of relying on profits as a measure of pricing power, we construct direct measures of markups based on standard economic models. Theory suggests that companies set prices as a markup over variable production costs, and that markup can be inferred from the share of a firm’s revenue spent on a given variable production factor, such as labor or intermediate goods. Over the period of data we use, we assume that the specific proportion of a company’s production costs going toward inputs does not change. If the share of a firm’s revenue used for inputs falls, it would imply a rise in the firm’s price-cost margin or markup. In our main analysis, we use industry-level data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) to compute markups based on the share of revenue spent on intermediate inputs. Our results are similar if we instead use the share of revenue going toward labor costs.

We compare the evolution of markups to that of prices, as measured by the PCE price index, since the recovery from the pandemic. In constructing this price index, the BEA takes into account changes in product characteristics (for instance, size) that could otherwise bias the inflation measure by comparing the prices of inherently different products over time. Similarly, based upon standard economic theory, our markup measure implicitly captures changes in those characteristics (see, for example, Aghion et al. 2023).

The post-pandemic evolution of markups

We examine the evolution of markups in each industry since the third quarter of 2020, the start of the post-pandemic recovery. Figure 2 shows that some sectors, such as the motor vehicles and petroleum industries, experienced large cumulative increases in markups during the recovery. Markups also rose substantially in general merchandise, such as department stores, and for other services, such as repair and maintenance, personal care, and laundry services. Since the start of the expansion, markups in those industries rose by over 10%—comparable in size to the cumulative increases over the same period in the core PCE price index, which excludes volatile food and energy components. However, the surge in inflation through June 2022 was broad based, with prices also rising substantially outside of these sectors. Thus, understanding the importance of markups for driving inflation requires a macroeconomic perspective that examines the evolution of aggregate markups across all sectors of the economy.

Figure 2 Cumulative changes in markups for salient industries

The role of aggregate markups in the economy

To assess how much markup changes contribute to movements in inflation more broadly, we use our industry-level measurements to calculate an aggregate markup at the macroeconomic level. We aggregate the cumulative changes in industry markups, applying two different weighting methods, as displayed in Figure 3. In the first method (green line), we match our industry categories to the spending categories in the core PCE price index for ease of comparison; we then use the PCE weights for each category to compute the aggregate markup. Alternatively, we use each industry’s cost weights to compute the aggregate markup (blue line). Regardless of the weighting method, Figure 3 shows that aggregate markups have stayed essentially flat since the start of the recovery, while the core PCE price index (gray line) rose by more than 10%. Thus, changes in markups are not likely to be the main driver of inflation during the recovery, which aligns with results from Glover, Mustre-del-Río, and von Ende-Becker (2023) and Hornstein (2023) using different methodologies or data. Markups also have not played much of a role in the slowing of inflation since the summer of 2022.

Figure 3 Cumulative changes in aggregate markups and prices

Moreover, the path of aggregate markups over the past three years is not unusual compared with previous recoveries. Figure 4 shows the cumulative changes in aggregate markups since the start of the current recovery (dark blue line), alongside aggregate markups following the 1991 (green line), 2001 (yellow line), and 2008 (light blue line) recessions. Aggregate markups have stayed roughly constant throughout all four recoveries.

Figure 4 Cumulative changes of aggregate markups in recoveries

Firms’ pricing power may change over time, resulting in markup fluctuations. In this Letter , we examine whether increases in markups played an important role during the inflation surge between early 2021 and mid-2022 and if declines in markups have contributed to disinflation since then. Using industry-level data, we show that markups did rise substantially in a few important sectors, such as motor vehicles and petroleum products. However, aggregate markups—the more relevant measure for overall inflation—have stayed essentially flat since the start of the recovery. As such, rising markups have not been a main driver of the recent surge and subsequent decline in inflation during the current recovery.

Aghion, Philippe, Antonin Bergeaud, Timo Boppart, Peter J. Klenow, and Huiyu Li. 2023. “A Theory of Falling Growth and Rising Rents.”  Review of Economic Studies  90(6), pp.2,675-2,702.

Glover, Andrew, José Mustre-del-Río, and Alice von Ende-Becker. 2023. “ How Much Have Record Corporate Profits Contributed to Recent Inflation? ” FRB Kansas City Economic Review 108(1).

Hornstein, Andreas. 2023. “ Profits and Inflation in the Time of Covid .” FRB Richmond Economic Brief 23-38 (November).

Liu, Zheng, and Thuy Lan Nguyen. 2023. “ Global Supply Chain Pressures and U.S. Inflation .” FRBSF Economic Letter 2023-14 (June 20).

Palazzo, Berardino. 2023. “ Corporate Profits in the Aftermath of COVID-19 .” FEDS Notes , Federal Reserve Board of Governors, September 8.

Weber, Isabella M. and Evan Wasner. 2023. “Sellers’ Inflation, Profits and Conflict: Why Can Large Firms Hike Prices in an Emergency?” Review of Keynesian Economics 11(2), pp. 183-213.

Opinions expressed in FRBSF Economic Letter do not necessarily reflect the views of the management of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco or of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. This publication is edited by Anita Todd and Karen Barnes. Permission to reprint portions of articles or whole articles must be obtained in writing. Please send editorial comments and requests for reprint permission to [email protected]