ECONOMY
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Who Is Still on First? An Update of Characteristics of First-Time Homebuyers
Donghoon Lee and Joseph Tracy Following the COVID-19 health crisis, home prices and mortgage rates rose sharply. This created concerns that first-time homebuyers (FTBs) would be disadvantaged and would lose ground. Earlier this year, we documented that the share of purchase mortgages by FTBs, as well as their share of home purchases, have actually increased slightly over the past couple…
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Flood Risk and Flood Insurance
Kristian S. Blickle, Evan Perry, and João A.C. Santos Recent natural disasters have renewed concerns about insurance markets for natural disaster relief. In January 2025, wildfires wreaked havoc in residential areas outside of Los Angeles. Direct damage estimates for the Los Angeles wildfires range from $76 billion to $131 billion, with only up to $45 billion of insured losses (Li and Yu,…
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A Check-In on the Mortgage Market
Andrew F. Haughwout, Donghoon Lee, Jonathan Lee, Joelle Scally, and Wilbert van der Klaauw Debt balances continued to march upward in the second quarter of 2025, according to the latest Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit from the New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data. Mortgage balances in particular saw an increase of $131 billion. Following a steep rise…
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The Zero Lower Bound Remains a Medium-Term Risk
Sophia Cho, Thomas M. Mertens, and John C. Williams Interest rates have fluctuated significantly over time. After a period of high inflation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, interest rates entered a decline that lasted for nearly four decades. The federal funds rate—the primary tool for monetary policy in the United States—followed this trend, while also varying with cycles…
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How Shadow Banking Reshapes the Optimal Mix of Regulation
Kinda Hachem Decisions that are privately optimal often impose externalities on other agents, giving rise to regulations aimed at implementing socially optimal outcomes. In the banking industry, regulations are particularly heavy, plausibly reflecting a view by regulators that the relevant externalities could culminate in financial crises and destabilize the broader economy. Over time, the toolkit for regulating banks and bank-like…
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Who Lends to Households and Firms?
Nina Boyarchenko and Leonardo Elias The financial sector in the U.S. economy is deeply interconnected. In our previous post, we showed that incorporating information about this network of financial claims leads to a substantial reassessment of which financial sectors are ultimately financing the lending to the real sector as a whole (households plus nonfinancial firms). In this post, we delve…
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The Rise in Deposit Flightiness and Its Implications for Financial Stability
Kristian Blickle, Jian Li, Xu Lu, and Yiming Ma Deposits are often perceived as a stable funding source for banks. However, the risk of deposits rapidly leaving banks—known as deposit flightiness—has come under increased scrutiny following the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and other regional banks in March 2023. In a new paper, we show that deposit flightiness is not…
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The Fed’s Treasury Purchase Prices During the Pandemic
Ellen Correia Golay, Maximilian Dunn, Michael J. Fleming, Peter Johansson, Isabel Krogh, Or Shachar, and Joshua Younger In March 2020, the Federal Reserve commenced purchases of U.S. Treasury securities to address the market disruptions caused by the pandemic. This post assesses the execution quality of those purchases by comparing the Fed’s purchase prices to contemporaneous market prices. Although past work has…
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New Dataset Maps Losses from Natural Disasters to the County Level
Matteo Crosignani and Martin Hiti The Federal Reserve’s mission and regional structure ask that it always work to better understand local and regional economic activity. This requires gauging the economic impact of localized events, including natural disasters. Despite the economic significance of natural disasters—flowing often from their human toll—there are currently no publicly available data on the damages they cause…
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Financial Intermediaries and the Changing Risk Sensitivity of Global Liquidity Flows
Stefan Avdjiev and Linda S. Goldberg Global risk conditions, along with monetary policy in major advanced economies, have historically been major drivers of cross-border capital flows and the global financial cycle. So what happens to these flows when risk sentiment changes? In this post, we examine how the sensitivity to risk of global financial flows changed following the global financial…
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