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

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