Reports

“In this blog post we show that demographic trends, specifically population aging, exert a powerful influence on labor force participation. In other words, the participation gap largely disappears once we control for population aging, indicating that participation has recovered a great deal since the large shock induced by the pandemic. Other possible contributing factors, such…

“Although researchers continue to discuss the possibility of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) for retail payments in the United States, the success of a CBDC will depend on consumer adoption. To understand how a CBDC could provide a good user experience, recent surveys in the United States and in other countries have asked consumers…

“This study aims to answer two related questions: first, whether or not voters react to the way an incumbent government manages the economy; second, whether that reaction depends on the origin of the shock (or “room to maneuver”). By exploiting a historical set of circumstances, we are able to isolate two economic shocks and their…

“In this article, we revisit the economics behind crypto conglomerates and highlight the associated risks. One prevailing principle of financial regulation is “same activity, same regulation.” However, such a principle tends to identify regulation by activities on their own and, hence, might ignore the amplification of risks that occurs when activities are bundled in a…

“There are signs that L&H employers are feeling less stressed about their staffing levels, which could possibly be a precursor to slower hiring ahead. Wage growth in the industry has fallen to pre-pandemic levels after a year of unusually rapid wage increases. Furthermore, after seven straight quarters where quarter-over-quarter growth in L&H wages and salaries…

“Lessons from the experimental data can be used by a central bank to inform the design of public messages that effectively guide rationally inattentive agents’ behaviors, using minimal attention resources.” “In a theoretical model that takes as an input the complexity faced by the public interpreting the central bank’s message, I found that, to effectively navigate people’s…

“There is no universal trend toward increasing con­centration. While deposits concentration increased substantially, none of these markets were concentrated by any traditional measures as of 2019, and they were not trending that way. Market entry, not increasing concentration, explains these trends. In mortgage lending, nonbanks have become major players. Meanwhile, small banks are still important…

“In this Letter, we show that house list prices respond to monetary policy surprises in a matter of weeks; this is contrary to the established research that suggests house prices take years to adjust. We find that short-term changes such as shocks to the federal funds rate have less of an impact than surprises to…

“Overall, for 54% of workers, nominal wage growth has not kept up with inflation. Typically, the share of workers with real wage declines ranged from 42% to 48% from the mid-1990s up to 2019, according to the Dallas Fed. Here, we took into account variation in consumption baskets and found that it does not play a large…

“This paper relies on a novel experimental setup to study the direction of causality between consumers’ inflation expectations and their income growth expectations. Based on the results from a large, nationally representative survey, we find that the rate of passthrough from consumers’ inflation expectations to income growth expectations is incomplete, on the order of only…