Search Results
How Is the Challenge of Finding Childcare Affecting Labor Force Participation? Perspectives from Employers Across the Seventh District
Through the Chicago Fed Survey of Economic Conditions (CFSEC) and during roundtable discussions with business, nonprofit, and government leaders, the Chicago Fed asked employers from a variety of sectors for their perspectives on how childcare access has affected labor force availability.1 These survey and roundtable findings contribute to the Chicago Fed’s Spotlight on Childcare—an effort to increase our understanding of how the lack of access to childcare impedes labor force participation in the Seventh Federal Reserve District. In this article, we summarize the responses from over 100 ...
How Do Manufacturers Decide When to Invest in New Equipment?
Although purchasing more and better capital leads to higher productivity, explanations for when and why firms choose to adopt new technology are not straightforward. In this article, we shed some light on how manufacturers choose to adopt new technology by purchasing equipment. The decision can be complicated, so we surveyed manufacturers to get insights into how they approach it. We find that the top two reasons manufacturers invest in new equipment with advanced technology is to keep up with competitors and save on labor costs. But upgrading is not always an obvious choice. Manufacturers ...
Newsletter
The Illinois Budget Crisis in Context: A History of Poor Fiscal Performance
The author looks back at Illinois?s expenditure and revenue performance since the late 1980s to understand the sources of its current fiscal crisis. The article shows that compared with the national average, Illinois used to be a relatively low-expenditure, low-revenue state. This changed in the mid-1990s, when, unlike the typical U.S. state, Illinois began consistently spending more than it brought in. A major contributor to this budgetary imbalance was the accumulation of pension liabilities.
Journal Article
The Chicago Fed Survey of Business Conditions: Quantifying the Seventh District’s Beige Book Report
In this article, the authors describe a new survey methodology used by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in constructing the Seventh District?s Beige Book report called the Chicago Fed Survey of Business Conditions (CFSBC). The design of the survey allows the authors to create a new set of quantitative indexes that track economic activity in real time.
Seventh District Midyear Review: Economic Growth Continued to Be Solid in the First Half of 2024
Overall, economic growth was steady during the first half of 2024 in both the nation and the Seventh Federal Reserve District.1 Real gross domestic product (GDP) growth slowed some in both, but employment growth was up, especially in the District. Over the last few years, the District has almost always lagged the nation in both real GDP and employment growth, continuing a decade-long trend. Slower growth and slower inflation often go hand in hand, and recent data indicate inflation has indeed been somewhat lower in the Midwest.
Working Paper
Evidence on the Within-Industry Agglomeration of R&D, Production, and Administrative Occupations
To date, most empirical studies of industrial agglomeration rely on data where observations are assigned an industry code based on classification systems such as NAICS in North America and NACE in Europe. This study combines industry data with occupation data to show that there are important differences in the spatial patterns of occupation groups within the widely used industry definitions. We focus on workers in manufacturing industries, whose occupations almost always fit into three groups: production, administrative, or R&D. We then employ two approaches to document the spatial ...
An Update on the Status of Remote Work from the Chicago Fed Survey of Economic Conditions
In many ways, people's lives have returned to the way they were before the pandemic. However, the rise of remote work appears to be one lasting change. In this article, we update a Midwest Economy post from August 2021, and show that across all sectors, many firms have a higher level of remote work than before the pandemic. Our results come from the Chicago Fed Survey of Economic Conditions (CFSEC), in which we asked about remote work from July 2021 through March 2024.
Newsletter
Can the CFSBC Activity Index Nowcast U.S. Real GDP Growth?
This article examines how well the Chicago Fed Survey of Business Conditions (CFSBC) Activity Index does at predicting U.S. real gross domestic product (GDP) growth for the current quarter (nowcasting). It also compares the index?s nowcasting performance with those of other economic indicators.
Journal Article
Education and the Evolution of Earnings Across Population Groups Since 2000
By nearly all macroeconomic measures, the US economy is in good shape: unemployment is low, jobs growth is steady, inflation is stable, and GDP has expanded uninterrupted for 10 years?the longest expansion in US history. The good news from the aggregate data means that most people are in the best economic position they have been in for some time. But by definition, aggregate data cannot tell us whether an overall good economy is benefitting some population groups more than others. This article disaggregates the good news in the macrodata by tracking the fortunes of a variety of population ...
Working Paper
Predicting Benchmarked US State Employment Data in Real Time
US payroll employment data come from a survey of nonfarm business establishments and are therefore subject to revisions. While the revisions are generally small at the national level, they can be large enough at the state level to substantially alter assessments of current economic conditions. Researchers and policymakers must therefore exercise caution in interpreting state employment data until they are “benchmarked” against administrative data on the universe of workers some 5 to 16 months after the reference period. This paper develops and tests a state space model that predicts ...