Reports

“Some of these pandemic factors that contributed to the surge in rents appear to be unwinding, as evident in Zillow’s measure of rent inflation. After running well above the official BLS measure of rent inflation, the Zillow rent inflation metric has since turned down sharply. Some policymakers have interpreted the decline in the Zillow measure…

“There are several good reasons why low and stable inflation is desirable. High inflation tends to distort prices and incentives to hold cash and buy certain goods and services. Furthermore, unstable inflation generates uncertainty in income and wealth holdings.” “On the other hand, policymakers are justified in accepting some inflation instability if this avoids such…

“The importance of the U.S. dollar in the context of the international monetary system has been examined and studied extensively. In this post, we argue that the dollar is not only the dominant global currency but also a key variable affecting global economic conditions. We describe the mechanism through which the dollar acts as a…

“How can a plethora of individual price changes in the economy be combined into a single number that represents the overall change in the cost of living? When building the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) accomplishes this by figuring out (via consumer spending surveys) what a representative basket of consumer…

“Within the context of a Ramsey model of capital taxation, we identified a force that operates as in Sargent and Wallace (1982) and pushes the government to increase its indebtedness to mitigate frictions in private asset markets. We showed that when it is impossible to completely undo those frictions in the long run, it is…

“Housing froth has reemerged since 2020, with signs of a pandemic housing boom extending beyond the U.S. to other, mostly advanced, economies. While house-price growth has recently begun to moderate—or, in some countries, to decline—the risk of a deep global housing slide persists.” “Specifically, the perils detected in the U.S. and German housing markets pose a vulnerability…

“This paper studies the determinants and aggregate implications of global shipping dynamics. Motivated by salient features of the dynamics of global shipping that we document, we develop a multi-country dynamic model of international trade with endogenous global shipping supply. We find that the model can account for salient features of global shipping dynamics. In particular,…

“Immigration policies enacted after January 2017 contributed to the decline in immigration prior to the sharp drop due to the COVID-19 border closures. Lower net international migration led to a slowdown in the foreign-born population and labor force growth. This contributed to the tightening in the U.S. labor market. Reopening of borders in 2022 and…

“Official-sector interventions to restore the functionality of government bond markets will occasionally be necessary. At the 2021 U.S. Treasury Market Conference, John C. Williams, President and CEO of the Federal Bank of New York, observed that “…two lessons are clear. First, the unforeseeable and unpredictable will happen, and can result in significant stresses in the…

“We have studied whether the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted noncognitive skills in a sample of professional traders and, for comparison purposes, in a sample of students. We have found a significant effect of the pandemic on professional traders’ Agreeableness and Locus of Control (and, to a lower extent, Grit), and on students’ Conscientiousness. Overall, our…