The University of Maryland's Melissa Kearney, author of The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, on the American fertility decline, the role of social norms, and the link between single-parent households and economic gaps.

MIT's Daron Acemoglu, the author of Why Nations Fail and Power and Progress, on Henry Ford, making AI worker-friendly, and how democracy improves economic growth.

Annamaria Lusardi on financial literacy, seniors versus scammers, and learning from the mistakes of NFL players.

University of Chicago economist on remote work, changes in recruiting, and business startups after the pandemic.

Columbia University economist on inflation, capital controls, and finding research topics.

George Mason University economist on credentialism, the new math of causation, and the lasting economic influence of youthful experiences.

Yale University economist on developing countries, measuring economies by satellite, and the learning crisis.

Harvard University economist on urbanization, the future of small towns, and "Yes In My Back Yard"

Nearly two-thirds of academic economists have taken on work as paid consultants at some point in their careers — and two in five have done so within the past five years.

University of Texas at Austin economist on wage growth, labor's share of income, and the gender unemployment gap

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

Stanford University economist on human networks, the friendship paradox, and the information economics of protest movements

UC San Diego economics professor on fiscal stimulus, technological lull, and the rug-rat race.

University of Toronto economist on managing pandemics, allocating vaccines, and low-cost prediction with artificial intelligence.

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

MIT economist on charter schools, the elite illusion, and the "Stones Age" of econometrics.

This gallery offers a record of some of the unprecedented economic changes that Americans experienced at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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.

Book Review

Automated telephone switching eventually displaced the women at the switchboards. But they kept their jobs for decades after the technology arrived

Harvard University economist on the world monetary system, the demand for safe assets, and measuring productivity growth

UC Berkeley economist on agglomeration economies, the "Great Divergence" among cities, and how housing rules affect economic growth

Microsoft's former chief economist on conducting research at tech companies, entrepreneurship within large firms, and the effects of artificial intelligence on markets

The Profession

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.

Jargon Alert

Modeling the U.S. economy on computers has come a long way since the 1950s. It's still a work in progress

Richmond Fed economist Zhu Wang asks why so many ATM networks disappeared after the mid-1980s

Jargon Alert

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.

French economist on the economics of online platforms, the future of jobs, and life after the Nobel Prize

When children enter a parent's profession, they probably aren't doing it blindly — they may have smart economic reasons. What's behind this footstep-following phenomenon?

Around the Fed

According to the authors, two factors could lead to an asymmetric multiplier: (i) financial frictions and (ii) downward nominal rigidities (that is, downwardly "sticky" wages and prices). This finding sheds light on likely outcomes of fiscal policies and helps account for inconsistent estimates of the multiplier in the literature.

Book Review

There are 1.8 million heavy truck and tractor-trailer drivers in the United States. Will self-driving trucks soon mean the end of many of those jobs?

Research at the Richmond Fed has exploited a large dataset of cash, check, credit card, and debit card transactions at a nationwide retail chain to examine consumer payment choice based on transaction size and location, day-of-week and day-of-month cycles, and longer-term trends.

Book Review

The Profession

Harvard University economist on venture capital, open-source software, and doing economic research in a business school

Research Spotlight

Book Review

When tech companies need to understand marketplaces, and tens of millions of dollars are at stake, some of them are turning to a new kind of researcher

MIT economist on the home mortgage interest deduction, changes in retirement finance, and the university's rise in the economics profession

Duke University economist on the future of bitcoin, the overconfidence of CEOs, and index funds

Policy Update

Book Review

Research Spotlight

Economists ponder whether demographic change will reduce the potency of the Fed's interest rate moves

The Profession

Book Review

The Richmond Fed conducts monthly surveys of business conditions in the manufacturing and service sectors of the Fifth Federal Reserve District. This article provides background information on these surveys and on other manufacturing and service sector surveys.

Why do debit card networks base their fees on a percentage of transaction amounts when the marginal cost of executing a transaction does not vary by amount?