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Keywords:Covid-19 

Newsletter
How Much Did the Minimum Wage Drive Real Wage Growth During the Late 2010s?

For much of the recent expansion, real wage growth was surprisingly sluggish, by some measures never reaching its pace prior to the 2008 financial crisis, despite tight labor markets that drove the unemployment rate to 3.5%. However, on average, the lowest-earning workers fared substantially better, consistently experiencing real wage growth of 6% or more for much of the late 2010s, a pace well above the previous two decades.
Chicago Fed Letter , Issue 435

Working Paper
Do Stay-at-Home Orders Cause People to Stay at Home? Effects of Stay-at-Home Orders on Consumer Behavior

We link the county-level rollout of stay-at-home orders to anonymized cellphone records and consumer spending data. We document three patterns. First, stay-at-home orders caused people to stay at home: county-level measures of mobility declined by between 9% and 13% by the day after the stay-at-home order went into effect. Second, stay-at-home orders caused large reductions in spending in sectors associated with mobility: restaurants and retail stores. However, food delivery sharply increased after orders went into effect. Third, there is substantial county-level heterogeneity in consumer ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP-2020-12

Journal Article
What are Banks Doing to Address the Impacts of COVID-19 on LMI Communities? Early Approaches to Addressing the Crisis

Lessons from history show that those who are most disadvantaged before a disaster are likely to be most vulnerable during a disaster as well as on the road to recovery. As the novel coronavirus continues to spread, we are witnessing heavy impacts on low- and moderate-income communities as small businesses shutter, workers are laid off, and more and more households find themselves in unexpected financial circumstances. Low-income individuals and households are more vulnerable to illness and potential economic disruption for a variety of reasons, including lower availability of paid sick leave ...
Community Development Research Brief , Issue 01 , Pages 01

Working Paper
Using the Eye of the Storm to Predict the Wave of Covid-19 UI Claims

We leverage an event-study research design focused on the seven costliest hurricanes to hit the US mainland since 2004 to identify the elasticity of unemployment insurance filings with respect to search intensity. Applying our elasticity estimate to the state-level Google Trends indexes for the topic “unemployment,” we show that out-of-sample forecasts made ahead of the official data releases for March 21 and 28 predicted to a large degree the extent of the Covid-19 related surge in the demand for unemployment insurance. In addition, we provide a robust assessment of the uncertainty ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP 2020-10

Journal Article
Small Business Lending during COVID-19

Small businesses and farms were hit hard by restrictions that limited their ability to pay operating costs during the COVID-19 crisis. Banks played an important supportive role, substantially expanding the loans available to these firms during the early months of the crisis. The growth in lending was associated with small business participation in the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and bank use of the PPP Liquidity Facility. Analyzing data for the first half of 2020 suggests that these programs were successful in supporting lending growth during the crisis, particularly among small banks.
FRBSF Economic Letter , Volume 2020 , Issue 35 , Pages 01-05

What Can Revisions to the NFCI Tell Us About Stock Market Volatility?

In this blog post, we document that recent revisions to the Chicago Fed’s National Financial Conditions Index (NFCI) have been large and clustered in time—a pattern not seen since the 2007–09 global financial crisis. As financial conditions tightened early on during the Covid-19 outbreak here in the U.S., there were large positive revisions to the NFCI through much of March. We show that revisions of this magnitude and in this direction have often preceded substantial increases in stock market volatility. More recently, in late March and April, the large negative revisions to the NFCI ...
Chicago Fed Insights

Financial Positions of U.S. Public Corporations: Part 4, Tax Relief

This blog post is the fourth in a series that discusses how the current pandemic affects the financial positions of publicly traded U.S. corporations, the potential implications of these financial developments, and the federal policy response. In this post, we discuss the adjustments to federal tax policy that have been initiated to support U.S. businesses and their possible effects. These measures represent a significant fiscal cost ($280 billion over ten years) and an even larger positive cash flow effect for businesses in 2020 (over $700 billion), because some measures are effectively ...
Chicago Fed Insights

Journal Article
The Fog of Numbers

In times of economic turbulence, revisions to GDP data can be sizable, which makes conducting economic policy in real time during a crisis more difficult. A simple model based on Okun’s law can help refine the advance data release of real GDP growth to provide an improved reading of economic activity in real time. Applying this to data from the Great Recession explains some of the massive GDP revisions at that time. This could provide a guide for possible revisions to GDP releases during the current coronavirus crisis.
FRBSF Economic Letter , Volume 2020 , Issue 20 , Pages 5

Measuring the Decline in Economic Activity During the Covid-19 Pandemic

On June 8, 2020, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) issued a statement announcing that its Business Cycle Dating Committee determined U.S. economic activity had reached a cyclical peak in February 2020. Beginning in March 2020, a multitude of economic indicators declined sharply as public health orders that required nonessential businesses to close were implemented during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic here in the U.S. The declines then accelerated in April as these orders were expanded to cover nearly the entire country. However, the data for May released so far seem ...
Chicago Fed Insights

Working Paper
Usual Shocks in our Usual Models

We propose an event-study research design to identify the nature and propagation of large unusual shocks in DSGE models and apply it to study the macroeconomic effects of the Covid shock. The initial outbreak is represented as the onset of a new shock process where the shock loads on wedges associated with the model's usual shocks. Realizations of the Covid shock come with news about its propagation, allowing us to disentangle the role of beliefs about the future of the pandemic. The model attributes a crucial role to the novel Covid shock in explaining the large contraction in output in the ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP 2022-39

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