ECONOMY
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Who Finances Real Sector Lenders?
Nina Boyarchenko, Hyuntae Choi, and Leonardo Elias The modern financial system is complex, with funding flowing not just from the financial sector to the real sector but within the financial sector through an intricate network of financial claims. While much of our work focuses on understanding the end result of these flows—credit provided to the real sector—we explore in this…
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The College Economy: Educational Differences in Labor Market Outcomes
Rajashri Chakrabarti, Thu Pham, Beckett Pierce, and Maxim Pinkovskiy It is intuitive that workers with higher levels of education tend to earn more than workers with less education. However, it is also true that workers with more education are much more likely to be employed, and this employment advantage of education has, if anything, grown in recent years. In this post,…
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Student Loan Delinquencies Are Back, and Credit Scores Take a Tumble
Andrew F. Haughwout, Donghoon Lee, Daniel Mangrum, Joelle Scally, and Wilbert van der Klaauw This morning, the Center for Microeconomic Data at the New York Fed released the Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit updated through the first quarter of 2025. Over the first quarter, overall household debt rose by $167 billion. An increase of $199 billion in mortgage…
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Student Loan Balance and Repayment Trends Since the Pandemic Disruption
Daniel Mangrum and Crystal Wang This month marks five years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, after which subsequent policy responses upended most trends underlying student loans in the U.S. Beginning in March 2020, executive and legislative actions suspended student loan payments and the accumulation of interest for loans owned by the federal government. In addition, federal actions marked all…
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Monetary Policy Spillovers in the Global Economy
Sushant Acharya, Ozge Akinci, Silvia Miranda-Agrippino, and Paolo A. Pesenti Understanding cross-border interdependencies and inspecting the international transmission mechanism of policy shocks is the raison d’être of open-economy macroeconomics as an intellectual discipline. The relevance for the policy debate is pervasive: over and over in the history of the international monetary system national policymakers have pointed at — and voiced…
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Will Peak Demand Roil Global Oil Markets?
Matthew Higgins and Thomas Klitgaard “Peak oil”—the notion that the depletion of accessible petroleum deposits would soon lead to declining global oil output and an upward trend in prices—was widely debated in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Proponents of the peak supply thesis turned out to be wrong, given the introduction of fracking and other new extraction methods. Now…
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Stablecoins and Crypto Shocks: An Update
Kenechukwu Anadu, Pablo D. Azar, Marco Cipriani, Thomas M. Eisenbach, Catherine Huang, Mattia Landoni, Gabriele La Spada, Marco Macchiavelli, Antoine Malfroy-Camine, and J. Christina Wang Stablecoins are crypto assets whose value is pegged to that of a fiat currency, usually the U.S. dollar. In our first Liberty Street Economics post, we described the rapid growth of stablecoins, the different types…
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Gauging the Strength of China’s Economy in Uncertain Times
Jeffrey B. Dawson and Hunter L. Clark Amid increasing pressure on the Chinese economy from China’s trade conflict with the U.S., assessing the strength of the Chinese economy will be an important watch point. In this post, we provide an update on China’s recent economic performance and policy changes. While China is likely to counter growth headwinds from the escalating…
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The Origins of Market Power in DeFi
Pablo D. Azar, Adrian G. Casillas, and Maryam Farboodi In our previous Liberty Street Economics post, we introduced the decentralized finance (DeFi) intermediation chain and explained how various players have emerged as key intermediaries in the Ethereum ecosystem. In this post, we summarize the empirical results in our new Staff Report that explains how the need for transaction privacy across…
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Is College Still Worth It?
Jaison R. Abel and Richard Deitz A college degree was once viewed as a surefire ticket to a good job and a clear pathway for upward mobility. However, concerns about the rising cost of college and the struggles of recent college graduates to find good jobs have led many Americans to lose confidence in higher education. This shift in sentiment…
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