Search Results
Journal Article
Foreclosure metrics
As the foreclosure crisis deepens, increased attention is being paid to foreclosure statistics, which are often used to judge the intensity of foreclosure problems both within and across regions. However, these statistics need to be interpreted carefully; different foreclosure statistics embed different information, and making informative comparisons with various metrics requires understanding how each is constructed.
Journal Article
Cleveland (on the) rocks
Cleveland?s employment growth has lagged the nation?s for nearly 15 years, a fact that is often blamed on the kinds of industries that are here?either the area is burdened with too much manufacturing, or it has failed to attract enough high-tech industries. But an analysis shows little support for that view.
How Has Ohio Fared in the Current Business Cycle?
This brief explores how Ohio’s economy has fared in the current business cycle and how it has compared to those of other states by using quarterly GDP data. It also examines the impact of Ohio’s industry differences on its GDP growth.
Lower-Wage Workers in Ohio Have Seen Strong Wage Gains Since 2019
In Ohio, the trend of relatively weak wage growth for lower-wage workers has reversed recently. This has resulted in the lowest wage inequality in more than two decades, with lower-wage workers seeing notably stronger real wage gains during 2019 to 2023 than for others throughout the wage distribution.
Journal Article
10 things to know about the shape of Ohio’s skilled workforce
Journal Article
The demographics of inflation opinion surveys
In this Commentary, we document that people report very different perceptions and predictions of inflation depending upon their income, education, age, race, and gender ? a strange finding that may provide an important clue to understanding how to interpret survey data of inflation expectations.
Many Major District Metro Areas Have Yet to Recover to Their Prepandemic Employment Levels
The nation’s employment took less than 2 years to recover from the pandemic-associated recession. That many metro areas in our region have yet to see the same recovery suggests that structural factors may be limiting their progress.
Journal Article
Demographic differences in inflation expectations: what do they really mean?
It has often been reported that different demographic groups show persistent differences in their inflation expectations. Some reasonable explanations have been suggested, but most have failed to fully explain these apparent differences. We argue that the demographic differences have been overstated by using the mean to describe differences across demographic groups. When we use the median to describe inflation expectations, we find little meaningful difference across demographic groups.
Journal Article
Adjustable-rate mortgages and the Libor surprise
Adjustable-rate mortgages have typically been tied to either of two indexes, one based on U.S. treasuries, the other on the London interbank offered rate, or Libor. The index is used to determine a mortgage?s new interest rate when it is reset, and up until recently, the choice would have made little difference. But since 2007, the rates on which the indexes are based have diverged sharply, and borrowers with Libor-based adjustable-rate mortgages are likely to pay more than they would have had their mortgages been tied to treasuries. Moreover, the proportion of Libor-based ARMs has increased ...
Working Paper
Trimmed-mean inflation statistics: just hit the one in the middle
This paper reinvestigates the performance of trimmed-mean inflation measures some 20 years since their inception, asking whether there is a particular trimmed mean measure that dominates the median CPI. Unlike previous research, we evaluate the performance of symmetric and asymmetric trimmed-means using a well-known equality of prediction test. We fi nd that there is a large swath of trimmed-means that have statistically indistinguishable performance. Also, while the swath of statistically similar trims changes slightly over different sample periods, it always includes the median CPI?an ...