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Working Paper
Insurance and Inequality with Persistent Private Information
Leukhina, Oksana; Bloedel, Alex; Krishna, R. Vijay (2024-08-11)
We study the implications of optimal insurance provision for long-run welfare and inequality in economies with persistent private information. A principal insures an agent whose private type follows an ergodic, finite-state Markov chain. The optimal contract always induces immiseration: the agent’s consumption and utility decrease without bound. Under positive serial correlation, it also backloads high-powered incentives: the sensitivity of the agent’s utility with respect to his reports increases without bound. These results extend—and help elucidate the limits of—the hallmark ...
Working Papers , Paper 2018-020

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 Do Natural Disasters Affect U.S. Small Business Owners?
Hiti, Martin; Kramer, Claire; Sarkar, Asani (2022-09-06)
Recent research has linked climate change and socioeconomic inequality (see here, here, and here). But what are the effects of climate change on small businesses, particularly those owned by people of color, which tend to be more resource-constrained and less resilient? In a series of two posts, we use the Federal Reserve’s Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS) to document small businesses’ experiences with natural disasters and how these experiences differ based on the race and ethnicity of business owners. This first post shows that small firms owned by people of color sustain losses from ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20220906a

Working Paper
The Pathway to Enrolling in a High-Performance High School: Understanding Barriers to Access
Sartain, Lauren; Barrow, Lisa (2020-12-04)
In 2017, Chicago Public Schools adopted an online universal application system for all high schools with the hope of providing more equitable access to high-performance schools. Despite the new system, Black students and students living in low-socioeconomic status (SES) neighborhoods remained less likely than their peers to enroll in a high-performance high school. In this paper, we characterize various constraints that students and families may face in enrolling in a high-performance high school including eligibility to programs based on prior academic achievement, distance from ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP-2020-32

Discussion Paper
Is the Tide Lifting All Boats? A Closer Look at the Earnings Growth Experiences of U.S. Workers
Topa, Giorgio; Karahan, Fatih; Chalom, Rene; Moore, Brendan (2020-03-04)
The growth rate of hourly earnings is a widely used indicator to assess the economic progress of U.S. workers, as well as the health of the labor market. It is also a measure of wage pressures that could potentially spill over into inflationary pressures in a tightening labor market. Hourly earnings growth, on average, has gradually risen over the course of the current expansion, under way since the end of the Great Recession. But how have different groups of workers fared in this regard? Have hourly earnings risen uniformly at all points of the wage distribution, or have some segments of the ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20200304b

Is College an Engine of Inequality?
Emmons, William R. (2021-02-04)
Higher education holds the promise of helping to level the playing field, yet data suggest that Black and Hispanic students are falling behind.
On the Economy

Speech
Classic Policy Benchmarks for Economies with Substantial Inequality
Bullard, James B.; DiCecio, Riccardo (2022-11-22)
St. Louis Fed President Jim Bullard participated on a policy panel during the Annual Conference of the Central Bank of Chile. The topic of the conference was “Heterogeneity in Macroeconomics: Implications for Monetary Policy.”During the panel discussion, Bullard presented "Classic Policy Benchmarks for Economies with Substantial Inequality." In the presentation, he outlined an argument that the contribution of a central bank to optimal macroeconomic policy may not be importantly altered by the presence of heterogeneous households. (He has presented previous versions of these slides at ...
Speech

Working Paper
Achievement Gap Estimates and Deviations from Cardinal Comparability
Nielsen, Eric R. (2015-05-12)
This paper assesses the sensitivity of standard empirical methods for measuring group differences in achievement to violations in the cardinal comparability of achievement test scores. The paper defines a distance measure over possible weighting functions (scalings) of test scores. It then constructs worst-case bounds for the bias in the estimated achievement gap (or achievement gap change) that could result from using the observed rather than the true test scale, given that the true and observed scales are no more than a fixed distance from each other. The worst-case weighting functions have ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2015-40

Discussion Paper
Revisiting Federal Student Loan Forgiveness: An Update Based on the White House Plan
Goss, Jacob; Mangrum, Daniel; Scally, Joelle (2022-09-27)
On August 24, 2022, the White House released a plan to cancel federal student loans for most borrowers. In April, we wrote about the costs and who most benefits from a few hypothetical loan forgiveness proposals using our Consumer Credit Panel, based on Equifax credit report data. In this post, we update our framework to consider the White House plan now that parameters are known, with estimates for the total amount of forgiven loans and the distribution of who holds federal student loans before and after the proposed debt jubilee.
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20220927

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

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