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A Mis‑Leading Labor Market Indicator
Samuel Kapon and Joseph Tracy The unemployment rate is a popular measure of the condition of the labor market. With the Great Recession, the unemployment rate increased from a low of 4.4 percent in...
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Comparing U.S. and Euro Area Unemployment Rates
Thomas Klitgaard and Richard Peck Euro area growth has been stalled since 2010, mired in the sovereign debt crisis, while the United States has managed a slow but steady recovery following the Great...
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Crisis Chronicles: The Commercial Credit Crisis of 1763 and Today’s Tri‑Party...
James Narron and David Skeie During the economic boom and credit expansion that followed the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), Berlin was the equivalent of an emerging market, Amsterdam’s merchant bankers...
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The Transformation of Banking: Tying Loan Interest Rates to Borrowers’ Credit...
João A. C. Santos Banks’ practice of tying loan interest rates to borrowers’ credit default swap (CDS) spreads constitutes one of the most recent financial innovations. In this post, I discuss evidence...
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The Long and Short of It: The Impact of Unemployment Duration on Compensation...
M. Henry Linder, Richard Peach, and Robert W. Rich How tight is the labor market? The unemployment rate is down substantially from its October 2009 peak, but two-thirds of the decline is due to people...
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Puerto Rico Employment Trends–Not Quite as Bleak as They Appear
Jason Bram Puerto Rico’s economy has been in a protracted economic slump since 2006. If there were officially designated recessions for the Commonwealth, it probably would have been in one for the...
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Just Released: Who’s Borrowing Now? The Young and the Riskless!
Andrew F. Haughwout, Donghoon Lee, Wilbert van der Klaauw, and David Yun According to today’s release of the New York Fed’s 2013:Q4 Household Debt and Credit Report, aggregate consumer debt increased...
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Just Released: Does Transportation Spending Make Good Stimulus?
Andrew F. Haughwout, Therese McGuire, and Joseph Morris On January 14, the Transportation Research Board, an arm of the National Research Council, released a new report, Transportation Investments in...
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Why Is the Job‑Finding Rate Still Low?
Victoria Gregory, Christina Patterson, Ayşegül Şahin, and Giorgio Topa Fluctuations in unemployment are mostly driven by fluctuations in the job-finding prospects of unemployed workers—except at the...
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Just Released: The Inflation Outlook in the Euro Zone . . . Survey Says
Robert Rich, Kaivan K. Sattar, and Joseph Tracy The European Central Bank (ECB) released its 2014:Q1 Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) on February 13. The release comes at a time of growing...
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Historical Echoes: Thomas Jefferson Slept Here on Maiden Lane/The Compromise...
Mary Tao In a prior blog post, we saw how Maiden Lane evolved over time. It was here that a momentous event occurred in 1790, changing the history of the United States. While serving as Secretary...
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What Makes a Bank Stable? A Framework for Analysis
Thomas M. Eisenbach and Tanju Yorulmazer One of the major roles of banks and other financial intermediaries is to channel funds from savings into valuable projects. In doing so, banks engage in...
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Factors that Affect Bank Stability
Thomas M. Eisenbach and Tanju Yorulmazer In a previous Liberty Street Economics post, we introduced a framework for thinking about the risks banks face. In particular, we distinguished between asset...
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Historical Echoes: Open a Kiddie Book and Read about Economic Principles, or...
Amy Farber Would it ever occur to anyone that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl, 1964) teaches economic lessons about “incentives, poverty, scarcity, producers, consumers, and competition”?...
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