ECONOMY
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Where Are Mortgage Delinquencies Rising the Most?
Andrew F. Haughwout, Donghoon Lee, Daniel Mangrum, Joelle W. Scally, and Wilbert van der Klaauw The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Center for Microeconomic Data recently released its Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit for the fourth quarter of 2025, revealing continued growth in household debt balances. Aggregate household debt balances rose by $191 billion to reach $18.8 trillion, marking…
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Does the Phillips Curve Steepen When Costs Surge?
Simone Lenzu Inflation does not always respond to cost and demand pressures in the same way. When shocks are small, the mapping from costs to prices is roughly proportional—double the shock, double the inflation response. But when the economy is hit by large shocks, this proportionality breaks down. As the recent surge and subsequent decline of global inflation showed, price…
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Anatomy (not Autopsy) of the Phillips Curve
Simone Lenzu The relationship between inflation and real economic activity has long been central to debates in macroeconomics and monetary policy. At the core of this debate is the Phillips curve (PC), which measures how strongly inflation reacts to movements in economic conditions. The steepness of this curve matters enormously for monetary policy: if the PC is steeper, inflation rises…
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What Can Undermine a Carbon Tax?
Pierre Coster, Julian di Giovanni, and Isabelle Mejean Several countries have implemented a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system to establish high carbon prices and create a disincentive for the use of fossil fuels. Essentially, the tax encourages firms to substitute toward low carbon emission energy. Costs also rise for firms down the supply chain that use production inputs with high-emission…
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Disability in the Labor Market: Employment and Participation
Rajashri Chakrabarti, Thu Pham, Beck Pierce, and Maxim L. Pinkovskiy Among people in prime working age (25-54), around 7 percent have a disability of some kind. In this set of companion posts, we will examine how prime-aged workers with disabilities have fared in the labor market compared to the year prior to the pandemic. In this first post, we will…
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Disability in the Labor Market: Earnings
Rajashri Chakrabarti, Thu Pham, Beck Pierce, and Maxim L. Pinkovskiy In our previous post we learned that, in general, people with disabilities participate in the labor market at significantly lower rates, and that they are much more likely to be unemployed. Despite these patterns, we found that the labor force participation of workers with disabilities rose noticeably following the pandemic.…
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Understating Rising Quality Means Import Price Inflation Is Overstated
Danial Lashkari It is common for price measures to consider changes in quality. That is, a price index might fall even though listed prices are unchanged because the quality of the item has improved. An adjustment for quality captures the fact that consumers are effectively getting more for the same dollar when product quality rises. In practice, however, it is…
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Measuring Labor Market Tightness: Data Update and New Web Feature
Sebastian Heise, Jeremy Pearce, and Jacob P. Weber Good measures of labor market tightness are essential to predict wage inflation and to calibrate monetary policy. In an October 2024 post, we introduced a new indicator of labor market tightness and showed that it tracked wage inflation best out of a broad range of tightness measures. In this post, we update…
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What Is a Carbon Tariff and Why Is the EU Imposing One?
Pierre Coster, Julian di Giovanni, and Isabelle Mejean The European Union has been an early adopter of carbon policies, with the introduction of the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) in 2005. This scheme sets a common price for carbon and is applied to the most polluting manufacturing sectors. By increasing the cost of emissions-intensive production, the system incentivizes firms to…
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Which Entrepreneurs Boost Productivity? – Liberty Street Economics
Ufuk Akcigit, Harun Alp, Jeremy Pearce, and Marta Prato Why do some entrepreneurs drive economic growth while others do not? This piece discusses new work that studies entrepreneurs using a comprehensive dataset from Denmark. We study who becomes an entrepreneur, along with their hiring and business decisions, and find that a distinct minority are “transformative.” These individuals, who generate disproportionate…
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