ECONOMY
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A New Indicator of Labor Market Tightness for Predicting Wage Inflation
Sebastian Heise, Jeremy Pearce, and Jacob P. Weber A key question in economic policy is how labor market tightness affects wage inflation and ultimately prices. In this post, we highlight the importance of two measures of tightness in determining wage growth: the quits rate, and vacancies per searcher (V/S)—where searchers include both employed and non-employed job seekers. Amongst a broad…
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Are Nonbank Financial Institutions Systemic?
Andres Aradillas Fernandez, Martin Hiti, and Asani Sarkar Recent events have heightened awareness of systemic risk stemming from nonbank financial sectors. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, liquidity demand from nonbank financial entities caused a “dash for cash” in financial markets that required government support. In this post, we provide a quantitative assessment of systemic risk in the nonbank sectors.…
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Exposure to Generative AI and Expectations About Inequality
Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington With the rise of generative AI (genAI) tools such as ChatGPT, many worry about the tools’ potential displacement effects in the labor market and the implications for income inequality. In supplemental questions to the February 2024 Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE), we asked a representative sample of U.S. residents about their experience with genAI tools.…
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The Central Banking Beauty Contest
Gonzalo Cisternas and Aaron Kolb Expectations can play a significant role in driving economic outcomes, with central banks factoring market sentiment into policy decisions and market participants forming their own assumptions about monetary policy. But how well do central banks understand the expectations of market participants—and vice versa? Our model, developed in a recent paper, features a dynamic game between…
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Flood Risk Outside Flood Zones — A Look at Mortgage Lending in Risky Areas
Kristian Blickle, Evan Perry, and João A.C. Santos In support of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) creates flood maps that indicate areas with high flood risk, where mortgage applicants must buy flood insurance. The effects of flood insurance mandates were discussed in detail in a prior blog series. In 2021 alone, more than…
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End-of-Month Liquidity in the Treasury Market
Henry Dyer, Michael Fleming, and Or Shachar Trading activity in benchmark U.S. Treasury securities now concentrates on the last trading day of the month. Moreover, this stepped-up activity is associated with lower transaction costs, as shown by a smaller price impact of trades. We conjecture that increased turn-of-month portfolio rebalancing by passive investment funds that manage relative to fixed-income indices…
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The New York Fed DSGE Model Forecast—September 2024
Sophia Cho, Marco Del Negro, Ibrahima Diagne, Pranay Gundam, Donggyu Lee, and Brian Pacula This post presents an update of the economic forecasts generated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. We describe very briefly our forecast and its change since June 2024. As usual, we wish to remind our readers that the DSGE…
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Are Professional Forecasters Overconfident? – Liberty Street Economics
Marco Del Negro The post-COVID years have not been kind to professional forecasters, whether from the private sector or policy institutions: their forecast errors for both output growth and inflation have increased dramatically relative to pre-COVID (see Figure 1 in this paper). In this two-post series we ask: First, are forecasters aware of their own fallibility? That is, when they…
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Can Professional Forecasters Predict Uncertain Times?
Marco Del Negro Economic surveys are very popular these days and for a good reason. They tell us how the folks being surveyed—professional forecasters, households, firm managers—feel about the economy. So, for instance, the New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) website displays an inflation uncertainty measure that tells us households are more uncertain about inflation than they were…
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AI and the Labor Market: Will Firms Hire, Fire, or Retrain?
Jaison R. Abel, Richard Deitz, Natalia Emanuel, and Benjamin Hyman The rapid rise in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to dramatically change the labor market, and indeed possibly even the nature of work itself. However, how firms are adjusting their workforces to accommodate this emerging technology is not yet clear. Our August regional business surveys asked manufacturing and service…
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