Search Results
Journal Article
District Digest: Measuring Social Capital Across the Fifth District
How cliquey is your community? How often do people from different income groups in your area befriend one another? Do your neighbors volunteer their time to charitable causes? Social scientists have long studied social capital — the strength and value of social networks within communities — as well as its effects on economic, health, and political outcomes. Political scientists have linked higher civic engagement with the strength of democratic institutions, while economists have studied the role that friendships across socioeconomic statuses might have in fostering economic mobility.
Working Paper
The Economic Impact of a Casino Monopoly: Evidence from Atlantic City
New Jersey voters approved legalized gambling for Atlantic City in a 1976 referendum, making it the second state after Nevada in 1931. The state explicitly leveraged the city's regional monopoly, which it held from 1978 through 1992, on casinos east of the Mississippi River as an economic development strategy to revive the blighted seaside resort town. The literature on the economic development effects of casinos suggests that sparsely populated areas without nearby competing gambling venues tend to benefit the most. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I model the economic impact of ...
Discussion Paper
Are Fifth District Firms Revisiting Their Prices Less Often Amid Cooling Inflation?
The Richmond Fed's monthly business surveys of Fifth District firms gauge regional firm dynamics in pricing. We carefully monitor changes in firms' realized prices as well as their pricing expectations, especially since inflation began to accelerate in 2021 and 2022. Early last year, we examined how firms began to adjust their prices more frequently as firms' price forecasts became less accurate and uncertainty rose, as evidenced by a rising standard deviation of price growth expectations.
Briefing
Casinos and Regional Economies: Has the Game Changed?
With casinos much more common across the nation than they were a generation ago, how might the development of a new casino impact its surrounding regional economy? We survey the literature on the local impact of casinos from a variety of economic and social perspectives. We find that, despite tax revenues being a major motivator for state legalization of casinos, there is little evidence that they boost state taxes. We also find that the job gains from casino development are limited to those in lower density areas that lack nearby casinos.
Journal Article
Regional Spotlight: Making Ends Meet
How does the local cost of living affect a household’s standard of living?
Discussion Paper
Understanding Immigration in the Fifth District: Where Did International Migrants Settle?
In 2022, the Census Bureau announced that international migration to the United States had returned to pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels, and recent estimates suggest immigration has surged to unprecedented levels. To understand how the flow of international migration changed in our region from the onset of the pandemic, we analyze recent census data that looks at population change and its components. During this period, population change and migration in the Fifth District differed from the national trend and varied across states. Even though this period includes the height of pandemic-related ...
Discussion Paper
Who Is Supplying the Labor for Recent Employment Growth in the Rural Fifth District?
Although many rural counties in the Fifth District have experienced population growth since 2020, total population has shrunk in rural areas. Rural regions in the United States have long experienced demographic squeezes as older people tend to stay in place and younger people migrate to metropolitan areas. But has the rural labor supply fared better since the COVID-19 pandemic? This post explores how changes in total population, out-of-the-labor-force population, and unemployment explain employment growth across the Fifth District's rural counties. In aggregate, rural counties have ...
Discussion Paper
Fifth District State Business Cycles
To model national and state business cycles, this post first explores fluctuations of payroll employment around its long-run trend, comparing the correlation of the state-level employment fluctuations to the national series. Second, it explores how a popular rule of thumb recession indicator, the Sahm Recession Rule, performs when applied to state-level data compared to national data during the past four economic downturns. Third, this analysis not only provides us with insight into states' historical relationships with the U.S. business cycle, but it also reveals how they might fare in ...
Discussion Paper
Addressing Baltimore’s Abandoned Housing
Abandoned housing has afflicted many Rust Belt cities since the mid-20th century as their populations declined and housing stocks aged. Many of these cities have attempted policy solutions to address excess abandoned housing due to its association with higher crime, lower nearby property values, and public health issues. In this post, we explore Baltimore's abandoned housing problem and how the city has addressed it with policy as well as a promising proposed strategy by a community organization.
Discussion Paper
Parsing the Slow Post-Pandemic Labor Market Recovery of Maryland’s Capital Suburbs
The District of Columbia and its inner ring suburbs — referred to as the Capital Beltway after Interstate 495 — has historically been the core job center for the Washington Metropolitan Area1. (See map below.) Following restrictions to in-person activities at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020, unemployment spiked within the Capital Beltway, jobs were shed, and commuting patterns shifted. The labor market recovery from the pandemic shock has been uneven within the Capital Beltway, with stronger growth in the Virginia suburbs than the District of Columbia and Maryland's ...