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.