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Not only has the share of the U.S. population that is 65 and older risen, but the share of these households living in their own homes has risen as well.

While closing the gap is difficult to tackle directly through policy, there are potential avenues for policymakers to help.

White households cover more medical expenses out of pocket or through payors such as private insurance, while Black and Hispanic households have larger shares covered by Medicaid.

According to a multisector DSGE model, heterogeneity in shock variances across sectors is critical for matching the empirical relationship between inflation and the distribution of relative price changes.

Peru shows that a brisk pace of job reallocation has the potential to significantly inhibit occupational skill specialization, potentially contributing to human capital and productivity deficits.

Several factors may have been permanently altered since the onset of the pandemic.

Policies aimed at helping specific sectors better adopt new technologies might see better returns when targeting sectors that affect a wide range of others.

A progressive tax system may reduce the incentive for households to increase their income.

Technology improvements may not matter as much as the age and experience of the workforce.

What do commuting patterns look like for Fifth District counties, and what do they tell us about a county's residents?

How has college tuition trended recently, and why?

Evidence from Hurricane Irma suggests that weather events can significantly impact mortgage defaults.

The effects of classifying neighborhoods by riskiness of home lending in the 1930s may still have modest effects on interest rates and fees today.

Economic policy uncertainty rises significantly leading up to an election and stays elevated for a couple months after the election is over.

What are early studies suggesting about how AI may impact labor productivity?

Demographic factors can simultaneously work in opposite directions when it comes to r*.

Among women born 1920-1949, family income is higher for those born in more recent years at almost every age. Since 1949, however, this trend has slowed considerably.

Negative impacts seem to be more muted than expected, and some firms say RTO increased employment.

Most native U.S. workers seem to benefit from having immigrant coworkers.

Not everyone continues to progress into better-paying jobs.

Early 2024 inflation numbers appear high, but should such an early-year jump be expected most years?

Some think such a trap for China is imminent, due to factors such as a surge in deposits, mounting deflationary pressures and high youth unemployment rates.

The effects of monopsony seem to be getting more attention recently.

The pattern of r* paths for other countries seem more alike to each other than they are to the U.S.

High inflation starting in 2021 has coincided with a more dispersed distribution of relative price changes.

An a la carte compensation model could improve the performance of the housing brokerage sector.

Helping one area could mean hurting another area.

It depends on their respective competitive landscapes.

Top firms entering markets don't appear to drive away local businesses.

Several factors include labor market participation, business cycle volatility and responsiveness to the underlying economic environment.

Even though expectations are not paramount in how most firms set their prices, there is evidence that inflation expectations matter.

How has the economy navigated previous rate cycles, and how do they compare to the current one?

What do various economic schools of thought say about the use of money?

Had U.S. immigration been more restrictive, the IT sectors in both the U.S. and India might have been worse off.

Do higher-ability workers naturally find their way to higher-productivity firms?

The Center for Advancing Women in Economics discusses how representation can improve.

Portfolio composition varies widely among age groups.

An alternative measure of profits — the price-cost markup — suggests that its contribution to inflation in the nonfinancial corporate business sector was rather small.

The evolving behavior of sectoral inflation complicates focusing on aggregate trends.

Jobs held by temporary workers aren't included in the official tally of job creation and job destruction, which leads to significantly underestimating the magnitude of labor market flows.

A lot of factors influenced the banking turmoil of 2023. This article provides perspectives on some of those factors.

Agents for homebuyers are typically paid a percentage of the final sale price, so the more their clients spend on a house, the more money they make.

What impacts can be seen based on the type of collateral used by businesses?

The updates result in a less volatile r* series that more closely reflects our prior belief as to where r* likely is.

The factors include intrinsic persistence, indexation, fiscal policy and unanchoring of expectations.

What is the typical lag between market interest rate increases and increases in CD and MMMF balances? Is the recent increase unusually large, or is more in store?

How far behind did students get during the pandemic, why did they get behind, and how can they catch up?

Workers seem to be in favor, but urban cores may hurt as a result.

Many use mortgage spreads as a gauge of market stress, but they actually seem to gauge something else.

The current cycle appears to be unique in how inflation has moved during this most recent series of rate hikes.

Severe weather shocks can have long-lasting impacts on the macroeconomy.

A 2020 paper on market power has ignited considerable attention, follow-up and criticism.

How much should imitators compensate innovators for using their ideas?

Higher borrowing costs for a sovereign can impact its GDP, consumption and investment, among other items.

Restrictions on immigration could cause production to shift away from the U.S. to other countries.

U.S. politics have become increasingly polarized, and this polarization has impacted the economy.

Long-term care expenses and coverage play a significant role in determining out-of-pocket expenses for older Americans.

The inaugural Marvin Goodfriend lecture, given by Hugo Hopenhayn, discussed how intellectual property rights must trade off incentives for innovation and knowledge diffusion.

Researchers covered topics including digital advertising, R&D allocation, production networks, and knowledge creation and diffusion.

Firm productivity plays a role in how many customers a firm loses after a price increase.

Even though economists have made huge leaps in understanding how monetary policy impacts the economy, there remains substantial disagreement and imprecision in the estimates.

Wage-price pass throughs may help explain why core goods inflation has risen so much faster in the current expansion than in previous ones.

Changes in unemployment appear to be strong recession predictors, especially when combined with lagged term spreads.

Even though Black and White college graduates borrow similar amounts for school, Black grads are significantly more likely to default on student loans.

Do relative price changes account for the behavior of inflation in the pandemic and post-pandemic eras?

Two forces may be working against the long-term unemployed in finding new jobs.

FTX and its affiliated arms seemed to create a risky situation that ultimately fell apart.

Moves toward stable inflation and maximum employment can be in conflict in the short term.

Just by allowing the securities in its portfolio to mature, the Fed could reach a normalized size of its balance sheet in two to three years.

The startup rate has been declining for decades, but another measure of business growth has spiked since the pandemic started.

Some believe declines in physical-asset prices prior to recessions make the recessions worse, but recent literature challenges the strength of that connection.

Improving such restructurings have garnered additional attention as sovereign debt has increased significantly in the past couple of years.

Many models and surveys on inflation expectations exist to help answer this question. In this Economic Brief, we explore the accuracy of these measures of inflation expectations and what information can be obtained from them.

Among the topics discussed were income growth volatility, AI's impact on productivity and how housing price changes affect young businesses.

Seemingly small international trade linkages can lead to substantial spillovers across countries, helping explain global comovement in GDP growth and inflation across countries.

A new paper finds evidence of causal effects of historical redlining on present-day exposure to environmental and climate risks in six large U.S. cities.

Many students use two-year colleges to determine whether they should go on to a four-year college.

One of the most striking differences between Black and White households is a large disparity in wealth. A potential source of this gap is differences in transfers of wealth within families through bequests or gifts.

Monetary policy, marriage, college admissions, and discrimination and socioeconomic outcomes were among the topics discussed at our recent conference.

Examining commuting behavior helps show how connected counties are in the Fifth Federal Reserve District.

The lockdowns resulting from COVID-19 provide an opportunity to examine what factors affect the strength of supply chains.

For some underperforming employees, employers might prefer using suspension rather than outright termination.

Pandemic-era unemployment insurance affected recoveries of low-wage job markets and high-wage job markets differently.

Techniques at the frontiers of econometrics were addressed by economists during a recent research conference.

Tariffs, property rights and producing inputs versus buying them: These were among the topics discussed at our recent conference.

The newer a product is, the more likely its price will change and the larger the price change will likely be.

Hard (or large) sovereign defaults have been associated with larger negative economic responses than soft defaults.

This theory may be obscure, even to economists, but it can have quite an impact on inflation.

The relationship between the producer price index and consumer price indexes has not always been clear.

One can argue whether the FOMC's response to inflation has been strong enough, but financial markets and surveys suggest that the Fed retains credibility for low inflation in the long run.

Data suggest that labor market tightness has meant an increased number of open jobs per unemployed worker and heightened employer recruiting effort per vacancy.

During bubbles, an innovation raises a company's stock price by more than it would otherwise, and competing company stock prices don't suffer as much.

How might a CBDC alter the banking system? How does credit easing affect bank runs? These and other questions were addressed during a recent Richmond Fed conference.

A new real-time measure of credit market sentiment appears to outperform credit conditions indicators currently used in the literature.

Some believe rises in financial aid such as student loans cause corresponding rises in tuition. But reality seems much more nuanced.

Persistence in inflation depends on the time period studied.

The yield curve is often used to gauge potential recessions. Can its predictive value be improved?

How many more borrowers working in public services recently became eligible for student loan forgiveness in the Fifth District?

As legal gambling options proliferate, commercial casino expansion is less likely to induce economic growth.

How does immigration policy impact economic growth? Do firms that hire more skilled immigrants perform better? These and other questions were addressed during a recent Richmond Fed conference.

Properly regulating stablecoins could achieve the same objectives as issuing a central bank digital currency.

Many assume that inflation affects all households the same. But that doesn't appear to be true.

When confidence in Terra's currencies was shaken, it created a freefall that couldn't be stopped.

In the OTC market for credit default swaps, some investors are more central within the trading network than others.

Diffusion indexes can help summarize survey responses, but they have some limitations.

Perhaps history can be a guide on whether central banks should issue digital currencies.

Even exploring a CBDC without ultimately issuing one can provide significant benefits.

Among the topics covered at the Marvin Goodfriend conference were Fed bond facilities' impact on corporate credit risk and how trade leads to a global Phillips curve.

When immigration is restricted in rural areas, native workers don't seem to fill the jobs left empty.

Commonly used summary statistics for measuring the Black-White wealth gap have significant limitations. Here's a measure to help address these limitations.

Unlike in other recessions, women's labor force participation was impacted more than men's. What impact did child care have?

Based on different sets of reasonable assumptions, we analyze several different scenarios for the future of this critical policy-relevant lever.

Evidence highlights the nuanced ways in which participants in the financial markets may be strategically adapting to climate change.

How did unemployment insurance expansion affect recovery from the pandemic-induced recession? What are the effects of federal minimum wage hikes? A recent research conference addressed these questions and more.

The unemployment rate is close to pre-pandemic lows, and job openings are at record highs. Yet, participation and employment rates are still below pre-pandemic levels.

Consumers who would benefit from lower tariffs on a good tend to matter more when setting trade policy than producers who want higher tariffs.

The recent high inflation had been due to price changes in a small group of expenditures, but that changed a few months ago.

The recent removal of several Russian banks from SWIFT has sparked questions about unintended consequences.

Many firms don't follow inflation closely for setting prices, but the recent high inflation may have some firms taking a closer look.

Remote work options seem to go hand in hand with greater geographic reach in recruitment efforts for some firms.

How the Standing Repo Facility interacts with resolution planning at large banking corporations will depend in part on guidance provided by regulators.

After regulations were implemented, dealer capital commitment, trade frequency and size decreased, while dealer bid-ask spread increased.

Studies suggest that short-term effects of such spending are small and long-term effects depend on an economy's sensitivity to such investment.

News about productivity shocks — even when these shocks have not even happened yet — seems to be a powerful additional source of economic fluctuations.

Is money essential? How do self-interested parties bargain to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes? These were among questions addressed at a recent research conference.

Workers are not fully compensated for their marginal contributions to their employers' revenues, and employers' market power has been increasing since the early 2000s.

The Fed's Overnight Reverse Repo facility has seen significant activity since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Do payday loan regulations help or harm consumer welfare? How many firms close due to financial market inefficiencies? These were among questions addressed at a recent research workshop.

This survey of climate finance research literature highlights key findings and their policy implications.

The rebound in employment from pandemic lows varied considerably across regions and sectors.

Government transfers may allow households to pull back from work to take care of loved ones or engage in other valued activities.

A decreasing-rate mortgage wouldn't increase its interest rate, but would decline when rates dropped, potentially saving significant refinance costs.

Less-educated White men who are incarcerated at least once have a higher survival probability than those who are never incarcerated.

The Beveridge curve — which measures the inverse relationship between the unemployment and vacancy rates — has shifted significantly outward and is much steeper than in pre-COVID times.

Increasing labor competition may drive wages down, but natives and immigrants specializing in working for different firms helps offset this effect.

Firms with high productivity place more establishments in dense locations and fewer establishments in low density locations.

Since 1980, survey forecasts have been modestly and consistently higher on average than the forecasts derived from a signal extraction model.

Prepping for medical expenses is more important for singles, while leaving bequests is more important for couples.

The Fed's relatively new repo facilities may create greater price certainty, but the Fed's intervention may mute valuable market signals regarding economic efficiency and stability.

The annualized PCE inflation rate over the period March through July is 6.5 percent, the highest five-month rate since November 1981.

Part two of our series examines studies on racial disparities in policing, crime reporting and the effectiveness of training programs.

Part one of our two-part Economic Brief examines the impact of crime on communities, the relationship between crime and policing, and how policing affects deterrence.

Recent Richmond Fed surveys shed light on how employers attempt to fill jobs.

Some argue that damages from climate change aren't large enough to affect the financial system, but what about amplification effects?

Unemployment insurance seems to help smooth consumer spending after a job loss, but there's disagreement on how much it discourages people from finding new jobs.

Household consumption shocks have accounted for close to 40 percent of pre-pandemic business cycle fluctuations.

Contrary to the traditional view, adverse events for a single firm can affect the economy as a whole, if the firm is large enough.

A recent Richmond Fed conference covered housing, Social Security claiming, savings and labor supply related to older households.

The new language — which has been in each FOMC statement since September — represents a significant shift in the committee's thinking.

The U.S. is considered a leader in payment services, yet it has fallen behind countries like China and Kenya in mobile payment innovation.

People who pay student loans back using income-driven repayment plans are less likely to default than those who use standard repayment plans.

Without a recent directly comparable episode, economic forecasters modified their models or sought additional information in data to create forecasts during the pandemic.

Targeted interventions toward COVID-19, rather than universal stay-at-home orders, might have resulted in less economic damage and fewer deaths, according to one researcher.

Facebook and Amazon are examining creating digital currencies, like Alibaba has. What drives platforms to develop these currencies, and should central banks be worried?

When rolling out vaccines to combat a pandemic, focusing first on those with intermediate vulnerability provides the greatest returns to society.

Recent legislation has again highlighted the U.S. welfare system. This EB summarizes the welfare system and a "work bias" embedded in many U.S. welfare programs.

Does gender diversity improve team performance? How should vaccines be allocated to combat a pandemic? How do employers affect how immigration impacts native workers? These were among the questions discussed by researchers during a recent virtual research workshop.

The recent stock market gyrations of GameStop and AMC Entertainment illustrate that companies' fates can sometimes hinge on self-fulfilling beliefs of stock buyers.

The "modern monetary theory" tenet that governments can continuously print money to fund deficits ignores the fact that governments ultimately must satisfy creditors.

A new theory of economic development integrates two existing paradigms to show that reducing distortions in "big push" regions could unleash massive growth.

The U.S. might benefit from replacing physical cash with central bank digital currency, but first the Fed must resolve several policy and implementation issues.

Newly available data show that larger and less liquid banks use the discount window more actively and that holdings of bank reserves are negatively correlated with discount window borrowing. Access to the discount window affects bank portfolio decisions, in particular holdings of reserves, in subtle ways.

This brief discusses the main contributions that college-educated immigrants make to U.S. productivity growth, such as providing scarce skills that supplement and complement skills of native workers, contributing disproportionately to innovation and promoting job creation in the United States by foreign-based multinational corporations.

Research finds that first-time incarceration can decrease men's lifetime earnings as well as increase the number of years spent unemployed or out of the labor force.

High labor market churn in the COVID-19 recession may exacerbate barriers to sustained wage growth for workers in high-turnover service sector jobs.

Lending by small and large domestic banks, and foreign-related banks evolved in distinctly different ways during the first several months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conducting a statistical analysis of U.S. economic data, economists from the Richmond Fed and the University of Bern find no evidence of hysteresis, the idea that seemingly temporary economic shocks can have permanent effects.

Households' expectations often differ from formal economic forecasts. The researchers quantify these differences and explain them by developing a "theory of time-varying pessimism." Embedding their new theory into a quantitative economic model, they find that fluctuations in pessimism have significant effects on macroeconomic measures, most notably the unemployment rate.

By quantifying climate change's effects and assessing potential mitigation and adaptation techniques, economists contribute valuable perspectives to conversations about the planet's future. This brief summarizes presentations from the Richmond Fed's November 2020 conference on climate change economics.

In rapidly evolving crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, indexes of financial conditions based on high-frequency data give policymakers more timely information than better-known monthly or quarterly indicators.

Economists at the Richmond Fed analyze the role of dealer-provided liquidity in sovereign credit default swap markets.

What does lifespan inequality mean for Social Security reform?

Economists at the Richmond Fed, the University of Virginia, UC Irvine, and Purdue analyze how monetary policy affects lending relationships for small businesses and vice versa.

In this brief, we focus on North Carolina and Washington, D.C., since they have experienced different trajectories of COVID-19 and may have different implications for the efficacy of our approach.

Research indicates that one promising strategy for rural development is maintaining and improving the quality of an area's public schools.

The Federal Reserve's purchases of agency mortgage-backed securities — launched in response to financial disruptions caused by COVID-19 — appear to have restored smooth market function supporting the continued flow of credit to mortgage borrowers.

Researchers and policymakers are wondering whether the economic losses associated with the COVID-19 pandemic will prove temporary or persistent. Examining the housing crisis of 2006—09 may provide some clues.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, public debt has increased dramatically and private debt seems likely to increase as well.

The authors forecast the effects of COVID-19 on loan-delinquency rates under three scenarios for unemployment and house-price movements.

Recent Richmond Fed research has shed new light on the functioning of the discount window and the role that stigma may play in achieving desirable outcomes.

A quantitative model of college enrollment suggests that the value of college access varies greatly across individuals.

The U.S. presidential election of 1896 provides an excellent natural experiment to measure the impact of exchange-rate uncertainty on bank balance sheets and the broader economy.

What caused the housing boom and bust of the early 2000s?

This Economic Brief evaluates the predictive capabilities of the yield curve and several other leading indicators, including the Conference Board Leading Economic Index (LEI), claims for unemployment insurance, manufacturing activity, consumer lending, and CEO optimism.

This Economic Brief highlights new evidence that significant changes in Japan's household consumption behavior did in fact coincide with the 1997 tax hike.

National markets in many U.S. industries seem to be increasingly dominated by large companies. Some policymakers have argued that this growing market concentration is a sign of weakening competition, but concentration by itself does not necessarily translate into market power.

Retirees face considerable medical expenses during their remaining lives. Model simulations suggest that although a large amount of that spending can be predicted — based on attributes such as income, health, and marital status — there remains significant dispersion.

This brief makes the case that research and policy should focus on four aspects of economic fluctuations: a short-term component (cycles of less than two years), a business cycle component (cycles between two and eight years), a medium-term component (cycles up to thirty-two years), and a long-term component (the trend).

Household financial distress is pervasive. Is this pattern driven by a small share of individuals experiencing persistent distress, by the majority facing more occasional distress, or something in between? Recent research indicates that over a lifetime, financial distress is unlikely for most but very persistent for some.

Prior to the advent of modern home mortgage markets in the United States, markets in which mortgage-backed securities and government-sponsored enterprises now play significant roles, prospective homebuyers had to rely on other mechanisms of home finance.

The recent flattening of the yield curve has raised concerns that a recession is around the corner. Such concerns stem partly from the fact that yield curve inversions have preceded each of the past seven recessions.

Small banks do, in fact, play a special role in the intermediation of credit in the U.S. economy. But when the cyclical properties of NIM are decomposed into the asset and liability sides of the balance sheet, it appears that the liability side drives the difference in the performance of small and large banks.

The choice between bankruptcy or bailout trades off different sets of costs on the economy. This Economic Brief presents a new tool that could assist policymakers with this evaluation, potentially helping to curb the "too big to fail" problem, serving as a useful complement to the "living wills" process, and making the resolution process more transparent.

Recent research has employed county-level data to look at the effects of federal government spending — in particular, the 2009—12 stimulus — on aggregate consumption.

A downturn following the collapse of an asset bubble — an episode of speculative booms in asset prices — can be severe and sustained, with output and employment often lower than in the prebubble economy. This Economic Brief considers some possible theoretical explanations.

This Economic Brief reviews the intuition and theory behind bank runs and the most popular proposed solutions.