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Urban and Regional Migration Estimates, Fourth Quarter 2023 Update
This Data Brief updates the figures that appeared in “Urban and Regional Migration Estimates: Will Your City Recover from the Pandemic?” with data for 2023:Q4 for all series. Migration estimates enable us to track which urban neighborhoods and metro areas are returning to their old migration patterns and where the pandemic has permanently shifted migration trends.
Working Paper
Industrial Composition and Intergenerational Mobility
For five decades, the share of adults employed in college-degree-intensive industries, such as health care and education, has been rising. Industries that provided employment for workers without degrees, especially manufacturing, have been reducing their payrolls. This economic transition could impact the probability of children obtaining higher levels of education than their parents achieved. In this analysis, measures of the local industrial composition from the Current Population Survey are merged with the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth using the confidential geo-coded records. ...
Working Paper
Premium Municipal Bonds and Issuer Fiscal Distress
Economic theory suggests that bond issuers of lower credit quality or higher opacity should be more likely to issue bonds with premium coupons (higher coupon rates relative to yields at issuance). Using a comprehensive data set of municipal bonds issued between 1992 and 2012 by more than 21,000 issuers, we show that this has not been the case until the early 2000s. We examine what changed in this market to bring it into greater alignment with economic principles. We argue that the Government Accounting Standards Board?s Statement 34 that required the use of accrual accounting rules in ...
Working Paper
Financial Innovations and Issuer Sophistication in Municipal Securities Markets
When local governments default or file for bankruptcy, it is often because public officials misunderstood the risks associated with innovative financial products. If unsophisticated municipal bond issuers were to widely adopt a high risk financial product, this could harm taxpayers and investors, as well as destabilize the financial system. This analysis uses municipal bond issuers? total debt outstanding as a proxy for their sophistication and investigates the relationship between sophistication and adoption of financial innovations. Using comprehensive data on securities issued between 1992 ...
Working Paper
Household Debt and Local Public Finances
In the wake of the Great Recession, steep declines in state and local government expenditures and employment were a large and persistent source of economic weakness. The business cycle was also characterized by large increases and decreases in household debt. We estimate the extent to which variation in local government revenues and expenditures can be explained by variation in the expansion of household debt from 2002 to 2007, and the contraction thereafter. We merge individual credit balance data with municipal financial data from the Census of Governments. Using Census block indicators, we ...
Working Paper
Private-activity municipal bonds: the political economy of volume cap allocation
State governments allocate authority, under a federally imposed cap, to issue tax-exempt bonds that fund ?private activities? such as industrial expansion, student loans, and low-income housing. This paper presents political economy models of the allocation process and an empirical analysis. Due to an idiosyncrasy of the tax code, the annual per capita volume cap varies widely across states. I estimate that, on average, there is an additional $0.80 per capita per year of borrowing for each additional dollar per capita of volume cap. This confirms that the cap is a binding constraint in most ...
Working Paper
Big Data versus a Survey
Economists are shifting attention and resources from work on survey data to work on ?big data.? This analysis is an empirical exploration of the trade-offs this transition requires. Parallel models are estimated using the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Consumer Credit Panel/Equifax and the Survey of Consumer Finances. After adjustments to account for different variable definitions and sampled populations, it is possible to arrive at similar models of total household debt. However, the estimates are sensitive to the adjustments. Little similarity is observed in parallel models of nonmortgage ...
The Impact of the Additional Appropriations on Federal Spending in the Fourth District
Headlines regularly report large changes in federal spending. But despite recent additional appropriations, it appears that the federal funds flowing into the Fourth District in 2023 have returned to their prepandemic levels relative to the District’s gross domestic product.
Urban and Regional Migration Estimates: Will Your City Recover from the Pandemic?
The COVID-19 pandemic caused a massive change in the movement of people at both the neighborhood and the regional levels in the United States. New migration estimates will enable us to track which urban neighborhoods and metro areas are returning to their old migration patterns and where the pandemic has permanently shifted migration trends.
Journal Article
The Evolution of Household Leverage during the Recovery
Recent research has shown that geographic areas that experienced greater household deleveraging during the recession also experienced relatively severe economic contractions and slower recoveries. This analysis explores geographic variations in household debt over the past recession and recovery. It fi nds that regions that had very high household leverage at the start of the recession have shifted back toward national norms, while the variation of leverage within metro areas has maintained steady relationships with neighborhood characteristics such as location,demographics, and the age of ...