“The results in this paper highlight the need to incorporate data on prices of both owner- and renter-occupied properties and rents in any analysis of potential overvaluation in the housing market. As we have shown, without data on the price of renter-occupied properties, one cannot construct a meaningful price-rent ratio, which may result in mistaking…

“The world’s population recently reached 8 billion people—the culmination of a century of rapid population growth. Whereas it took 125 years for the world’s population to double from 1 billion (in 1803) to 2 billion (in 1928), it took only 47 years to reach 4 billion in 1975, and another 47 years to reach 8…

“Call reports—regulatory filings in which commercial banks report their assets, liabilities, income, and other information—are one of the most-used data sources in banking and finance. Though call reports were collected as far back as 1867, the underlying data are only easily accessible for the recent past: the mid-1980s onward in the case of the FDIC’s FFIEC…

“In the US, workers must satisfy two requirements to receive unemployment insurance (UI): a tenure requirement of a minimum work spell and a monetary requirement of past minimum earnings. Using discontinuity of UI rules at state borders, we find that the monetary requirement decreases the number of employers and the share of part-time workers, while…

“In this Chicago Fed Letter, we use a quantitative macroeconomic model to tackle the question of whether the response of the Federal Reserve (the Fed) to recent high inflation is consistent with its historical behavior. This is an important question because systematic deviations from past behavior could lead the private sector to revise its expectations…

“Many central banks and government agencies use nowcasting techniques to obtain policy relevant information about the business cycle. Existing nowcasting methods, however, have two critical shortcomings for this purpose. First, in contrast to machine-learning models, they do not provide much if any guidance on selecting the best explantory variables (both high- and low-frequency indicators) from…

“We introduce a survey instrument that measures earnings risk. A key feature of our instrument is that it conditions on possible job transitions, i.e., whether people stay in their current job, quit or are laid off. A link with administrative data provides many credibility checks. It also reveals subjective earnings risk to be significantly lower…