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Discussion Paper
How Have Racial and Ethnic Earnings Gaps Changed after COVID-19?
Chatterji-Len, Kasey; García, Daniel I.; Pinkovskiy, Maxim L.; Chakrabarti, Rajashri (2022-10-20)
Racial and ethnic earnings disparities have been salient features of the U.S. economy for decades. Between the pandemic-driven recession in 2020 and the rising inflation since 2021, workers’ real and nominal earnings have seen rapid change. To get a sense of how recent economic conditions have affected earnings disparities, we examine real and nominal weekly earnings trends for Asian, Black, Hispanic, and white workers. We find that average real weekly earnings have been declining in the past year, but less so for Black and Hispanic workers than for white and Asian workers. Black and ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20221020a

Discussion Paper
How Equitable Has the COVID Labor Market Recovery Been?
Avtar, Ruchi; Chakrabarti, Rajashri; Pinkovskiy, Maxim L. (2022-06-30)
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 ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20220630a

Discussion Paper
Understanding the Racial and Income Gap in COVID-19: Public Transportation and Home Crowding
Avtar, Ruchi; Chakrabarti, Rajashri; Pinkovskiy, Maxim L. (2021-01-12)
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 ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20210112b

Report
Inequality Within Countries is Falling: Underreporting Robust Estimates of World Poverty, Inequality, and the Global Distribution of Income
Pinkovskiy, Maxim L.; Sala-i-Martin, Xavier X.; Chatterji-Len, Kasey; Nober, William (2024-09-01)
Household surveys suffer from persistent and growing underreporting. We propose a novel procedure to adjust reported survey incomes for underreporting by estimating a model of misreporting whose main parameter of interest is the elasticity of regional national accounts income to regional survey income, which is closely related to the elasticity of underreporting with respect to income. We find this elasticity to be substantial but roughly constant over time, implying a large but relatively constant correction to survey-derived inequality estimates. Underreporting of income by the bottom 50 ...
Staff Reports , Paper 1125

Discussion Paper
Transition Risks in the Fed’s Second District and the Nation
Blickle, Kristian S.; Chakrabarti, Rajashri; Pinkovskiy, Maxim L. (2023-11-09)
Climate change may pose two types of risk to the economy—from policies and consumer preferences as the energy system transitions to a lower dependence on carbon (in other words, transition risks) or from damages stemming from the direct impacts of climate change (physical risks). In this post, we follow up on our previous post that studied the exposure of the Federal Reserve’s Second District to physical risks by considering how transition risks affect different parts of the District and how they differentially affect the District relative to the nation. We find that, relative to other ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20231109

Discussion Paper
Does the BCG Vaccine Protect Against Coronavirus? Applying an Economist’s Toolkit to a Medical Question
Pinkovskiy, Maxim L.; Bluhm, Richard (2020-05-11)
As COVID-19 has spread across the globe, there is an intense search for treatments and vaccines, with numerous trials running in multiple countries. Several observers and prominent news outlets have noticed that countries still administering an old vaccine against tuberculosis—the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine—have had fewer coronavirus cases and fewer deaths per capita in the early stages of the outbreak. But is that correlation really strong evidence that the BCG vaccine provides some defense against COVID-19? In this post, we look at the incidence of coronavirus cases along ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20200511

Discussion Paper
Tracking the K‑Shaped Economy: Who’s Driving Spending?
Chakrabarti, Rajashri; Pham, Thu; Pierce, Beckett; Pinkovskiy, Maxim L. (2026-05-01)
Aggregate real consumer spending has risen solidly since 2023. However, it is less clear how widely shared this improvement has been across all segments of society. This is important because systematic heterogeneity may mask the dependence of aggregate growth on a relatively small group of households and thus conceal macroeconomic risks. In this post, we use consumer spending data recently added to the Economic Heterogeneity Indicators (EHIs) and find that retail spending growth has been driven by high-income households—those earning more than $125,000 per year. In the popular press, the ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20260501a

Discussion Paper
Explaining the K‑Shaped Economy: What’s Behind the Divide?
Chakrabarti, Rajashri; Pham, Thu; Pierce, Beckett; Pinkovskiy, Maxim L. (2026-05-01)
In our companion post, we used a new module of our Economic Heterogeneity Indicators (EHIs) to shed light on how recent retail spending growth has been driven by high-income households. This fact is consistent with the popular press’s idea of a “K-shaped economy” in which higher-income households experience faster growth in spending than lower-income households. In this post, we dive deeper into the reasons behind this divergence by analyzing for which goods this trend holds true and ask whether it can be explained by changes in wages, inflation, or wealth. We find that, since 2023, ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20260501b

Discussion Paper
Same Shock, Different Roads? A K‑Shaped Pattern at the Pump
Chakrabarti, Rajashri; Pham, Thu; Pierce, Beckett; Pinkovskiy, Maxim L. (2026-05-06)
In March 2026, energy prices surged to a four-year high, driven by the Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz amid the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. In this Liberty Street Economics post, we use the new consumer spending module of the Economic Heterogeneity Indicators to analyze recent changes in nominal and real gas consumption across different income groups. We find that households had very different experiences with gasoline spending: in March, high-income households increased nominal spending the most and kept real consumption essentially unchanged, while low-income households ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20260506

Discussion Paper
The Regional Side of the Story: K‑Shaped Pattern in Region, Wider Gap in Gas Spending
Chakrabarti, Rajashri; Pham, Thu; Pierce, Beckett; Pinkovskiy, Maxim L. (2026-05-28)
In this post, we use the inaugural release of our regional consumer spending indicators to ask whether these patterns hold for a significant portion of the Second District, and how regional spending patterns by income have been similar to or different from the national patterns we documented earlier. We find similar K‑shaped patterns in both retail and gas spending in our region as we do in the nation, with the K‑shaped pattern in gasoline in response to the recent gas price shock being more pronounced in the region.
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20260528

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