Search Results
Journal Article
What constitutes substantial employment gains in today’s labor market?
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has tied its asset purchases to a ?substantial improvement? in labor market conditions. While we don?t speculate on what the FOMC means by substantial improvement, we do explore the level of monthly job gains that would gradually deliver the underlying trend unemployment rate within a reasonable timeframe, under several plausible scenarios. We find that the path of monthly job gains, which is highly dependent on a few key parameters, is likely to be smaller than the path associated with previous recoveries.
Working Paper
Manufacturing Employment Losses and the Economic Performance of the Industrial Heartland
The industrial Midwest, sometimes referred to disparagingly as the ?Rust Belt,? has long been recognized as a distinct economic region and an important contributor to the US economy. Prior research has emphasized the role that losses in the manufacturing sector have played in the plight of several Midwestern states and cities, particularly in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We identify a hypothetical industrial heartland region consisting of MSAs that have high concentrations of 1969 earnings in manufacturing relative to the US average and that are located within the geography often ...
Working Paper
Is \"Fintech\" Good for Small Business Borrowers? Impacts on Firm Growth and Customer Satisfaction
?Fintech? is a rapidly expanding segment of the financial market that is receiving much attention from investors and increasing regulatory scrutiny. While the attention is rising, very little is known about the performance of these lending sources on the outcomes of small businesses that make use of them. The Federal Reserve?s 2015 Small Business Credit Survey has data on the experiences of business owners with this new funding source and can provide some useful insights into this expanding sector, if compositional differences among the businesses that get bank loans, those that get fintech ...
Working Paper
Basic Facts on the Coverage of the Paycheck Protection Program
This paper applies loan-level information from Paycheck Protection Program loans to analyze the coverage of this extraordinary lending program. We show that loans went to a large share of small businesses across most industries in the US, especially to industries that were most negatively impacted by COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. We geocode the loans and then identify that 2021 loans were more concentrated in low- and moderate-income communities, along with census tracts where minority residents are a majority of the population. The growth of nonemployer loans and fintech lending in the ...
Journal Article
The effect of falling home prices on small business borrowing
Small businesses continue to report problems in obtaining the financing they need. Because small business owners may rely heavily on the value of their homes to finance their businesses (through mortgages or home equity lines), the fall in housing prices might be one of the causes of their difficulty. We analyze information from a variety of sources and find that homes do constitute an important source of capital for small business owners and that the impact of the recent decline in housing prices is significant enough to be a real constraint on small business finances.
Working Paper
The Rise of Fintech Lending to Small Businesses: Businesses’ Perspectives on Borrowing
Online lending through fintech firms is a rapidly expanding segment of the financial market that is receiving much attention from investors and increasing scrutiny from regulators. Research is only beginning to assess how fintech firms’ entry is altering the choices and outcomes of small businesses that borrow from them. The Federal Reserve Small Business Credit Survey is a unique data source on the experiences of business owners with new and more traditional sources of credit. We find that the businesses using online lenders are not representative of small and medium-size enterprise in the ...
Journal Article
Are we engineering ourselves out of manufacturing jobs?
Since the 1970s, productivity growth in the manufacturing sector has outpaced the overall economy, yet the sector?s share of the workforce has declined dramatically. This leads us to ask if we are in fact engineering ourselves out of jobs. This Economic Commentary explores the relationship between productivity and employment and points out why this apparently straightforward relationship may be more complicated than it appears.
Journal Article
What’s Gone Wrong (and Right) in the Industrial Heartland?
The historically Midwestern manufacturing region, sometimes referred to as the ?Rust Belt,? faced another challenging period after 2000 when manufacturing employment declined by 1.2 million jobs. This Commentary investigates the relative economic performance of this region versus other US metropolitan areas during and following these job losses. The analysis shows that while unemployment rates have recovered in the metro areas of the industrial heartland, other economic indicators lag behind the manufacturing-intensive metro areas outside of the region.
Conference Paper
The interaction of labor markets and inflation: analysis of micro data from the International Wage Flexibility Project
Inflation can ?grease? the wheels of economic adjustment in the labor market by relieving the constraint imposed by downward nominal wage rigidity, but not if there is also substantial downward real wage rigidity. At the same time, inflation can throw ?sand? in the wheels of economic adjustment by degrading the value of price signals. A number of recent studies suggest that wage rigidity is much more important for business cycles and monetary policy than previously believed (see Erceg, Henderson and Levin, 2000, Smets and Wouters, 2003, and Hall, 2005). Thus, our results on how wage rigidity ...