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Discussion Paper
How Equitable Has the COVID Labor Market Recovery Been?
One of the two monetary policy goals of the Federal Reserve System— one-half of our dual mandate—is to aim for “maximum employment.” However, labor market outcomes are not monolithic, and different demographic and economic groups experience different labor market outcomes. In this post, we analyze heterogeneity in employment rates by race and ethnicity, focusing on the COVID-19 recession of March-April 2020 and its aftermath. We find that the demographic employment gaps temporarily increased during the onset of the pandemic but narrowed back by spring 2022 to close to where they were ...
Discussion Paper
Understanding the Racial and Income Gap in COVID-19: Public Transportation and Home Crowding
This is the second post in a series that aims to understand the gap in COVID-19 intensity by race and income. In our first post, we looked at how comorbidities, uninsurance rates, and health resources may help to explain the race and income gap observed in COVID-19 intensity. We found that a quarter of the income gap and more than a third of the racial gap in case rates are explained by health status and system factors. In this post, we look at two factors related to indoor density—namely public transportation use and home crowding. Here, we will aim to understand whether these two factors ...
Discussion Paper
Uneven Distribution of Household Debt by Gender, Race, and Education
Household debt has risen markedly since 2013 and amounts to more than $15 trillion dollars. While the aggregate volume of household debt has been well-documented, literature on the gender, racial and education distribution of debt is lacking, largely because of an absence of adequate data that combine debt, demographic, and education information. In a three-part series beginning with this post, we seek to bridge this gap. In this first post, we focus on differences in debt holding behavior across race and gender. Specifically, we explore gender and racial disparities in different types of ...
Discussion Paper
Understanding the Racial and Income Gap in Covid-19: Health Insurance, Comorbidities, and Medical Facilities
Our previous work documents that low-income and majority-minority areas were considerably more affected by COVID-19, as captured by markedly higher case and death rates. In a four-part series starting with this post, we seek to understand the reasons behind these income and racial disparities. Do disparities in health status translate into disparities in COVID-19 intensity? Does the health system play a role through health insurance and hospital capacity? Can disparities in COVID-19 intensity be explained by high-density, crowded environments? Does social distancing, pollution, or the age ...
Discussion Paper
Understanding the Racial and Income Gap in Commuting for Work Following COVID-19
The introduction of numerous social distancing policies across the United States, combined with voluntary pullbacks in activity as responses to the COVID-19 outbreak, resulted in differences emerging in the types of work that were done from home and those that were not. Workers at businesses more likely to require in-person work—for example, some, but not all, workers in healthcare, retail, agriculture and construction—continued to come in on a regular basis. In contrast, workers in many other businesses, such as IT and finance, were generally better able to switch to working from home ...
Discussion Paper
Was the 2021-22 Rise in Inflation Equitable?
In our previous post, we discussed how the labor market recovery—the “maximum employment” half of the Federal Reserve System’s dual mandate—featured not only a return of overall employment rates to pre-pandemic levels, but also a narrowing of racial and ethnic gaps in employment rates. In this post, we take up the second half of the dual mandate—price stability—and discuss heterogeneity in inflation rates faced by different demographic groups during the rise in inflation in2021-22. We find that, in contrast to inequalities in employment rates, disparities in inflation rates have ...
Discussion Paper
Unequal Distribution of Delinquencies by Gender, Race, and Education
Once again, we utilize multivariate regression analysis and present bar charts for the regression coefficients of interest; these show the correlations between demographics, educational outcomes, and debt delinquencies, controlling for factors such as immigration and visa status, type of high school attended, year of entry to CUNY, and whether a student has a disability, is economically disadvantaged, or is an English language learner. The charts shown below are split into two panels: the upper panel represents results for students who enter CUNY for an associate (AA) degree, while the lower ...
Discussion Paper
Unequal Burdens: Racial Differences in ICU Stress during the Third Wave of COVID-19
A critical risk during the COVID-19 pandemic has been the possibility of the hospital system becoming overwhelmed. COVID-19 not only has killed nearly 2 percent of people with confirmed infections but causes many more who contract it to develop severe complications that are potentially fatal if not treated in an intensive care unit (ICU). As ICU capacity is based on typical needs for intensive care before the pandemic, a surge of COVID-related ICU patients may leave no room for individuals requiring intensive care for other reasons—such as heart attacks—or may exceed the total ICU ...
Journal Article
Understanding the Linkages between Climate Change and Inequality in the United States
The authors conduct a review of the existing academic literature to outline possible links between climate change and inequality in the United States. First, researchers have shown that the impact of both physical and transition risks may be uneven across location, income, race, and age. This is driven by a region’s geography as well as its ability to adapt. Second, measures that individuals and governments take to adapt to climate change and to transition to lower emissions risk increasing inequality. Finally, while federal aid and insurance coverage can mitigate the direct impact of ...
Discussion Paper
Racial and Income Gaps in Consumer Spending following COVID-19
This post is the first in a two-part series that seeks to understand whether consumer spending patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic evolved differentially across counties by race and income. As the pandemic hit and social distancing restrictions were put into place in March 2020, consumer spending plummeted. Subsequently, as social distancing restrictions began to be relaxed later in spring 2020, consumer spending started to rebound. We find that higher-income counties had a considerably steeper decline and a shallower recovery than low-income counties did. The differences by race were also ...