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Declining immigration weighs on GDP growth, with little impact on inflation
Unauthorized immigration surged sharply in 2021–24 but has since declined abruptly with negative implications for economic growth. Estimates based on historical data and a structural vector autoregression model suggest gross domestic product growth in 2025 is 0.75 to 1 percentage points lower than in a benchmark simulation using the Congressional Budget Office’s immigration projections through November 2024.
Migration to Texas Fills Critical Gaps in Workforce, Human Capital
Continuing to retain working-age Texans and attract new ones from around the country and abroad is vital to maintaining the state’s workforce—its human capital—as baby boomers retire and birth rates decline.
Texas natives likeliest to ‘stick’ around, pointing to state’s economic health
Based on a calculation measuring the share of people born in each state who still live there, Texas is the nation’s “stickiest” state. The natives aren’t leaving.
Unprecedented U.S. immigration surge boosts job growth, output
U.S. labor market conditions are among the main drivers of an unprecedented surge of immigration, the exact size and consequences of which are still being assessed.
Journal Article
Preface: Technology, growth, and the labor market
In recent years, economic prognosticators have pondered whether the U.S. economy has entered a new era characterized by technological innovations that have raised productivity and, accordingly, removed pricing power from producers. Although the 2001 recession quelled debate about whether the United States, and perhaps the world, had entered a period of sustained high levels of economic growth, researchers continue to investigate the economic effects of technological change. ; This issue of the Economic Review contains four articles that examine the underpinnings of the "new ...
Journal Article
The effect of immigration on output mix, capital, and productivity
The growing influx of immigrants into the United States has prompted concerns about potential negative effects on native workers, especially the less skilled. Such concerns have not been borne out by many studies of the effect of immigration on wages. However, the typical theoretical negative effect of immigration flows on wages may be offset by changes in other aspects of the economy, including output mix, productivity, and capital. ; This article examines the relationship between immigration and three factors-output mix, labor productivity, and capital-in the skilled and unskilled sectors ...
Journal Article
The Beige Book: Timely information on the regional economy
In making monetary policy, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) relies in part on the Beige Book, a report on regional economic conditions released publicly about two weeks before each FOMC meeting. The Beige Book summarizes economic conditions in each of the twelve Federal Reserve districts and provides an overview of national conditions based on the regional reports. ; The Reserve Banks gather information for their regional summaries from a variety of sources, including telephone and written surveys, local news reports, and reports on current and expected economic conditions from the ...
Journal Article
Monetary policy and racial unemployment rates
When the Federal Open Market Committee began raising interest rates in June 1999 to forestall inflationary pressures, concern mounted that monetary policy moves might slow the pace of economic growth, undoing the employment gains minorities and other disadvantaged groups made during the 1990s. Implicit in such concern is the idea that these groups will be disproportionately affected by an economic slowdown. ; To explore this issue, this article analyzes the effect of exogenous movements in monetary policy and other macroeconomic variables on the overall and black unemployment rates. These ...
Journal Article
Why minimum wage hikes may not reduce employment
Recent research has challenged the conventional wisdom among economists that increases in the minimum wage reduce employment among low-wage workers. Although some studies continue to find negative effects, others suggest that moderately raising the minimum wage may not reduce employment. The author of this article describes and evaluates several models that may explain the controversial recent findings and proposes avenues for future research that would help determine the validity of these models. ; The author notes that if the recent findings that minimum wage increases do not always ...
Journal Article
Unions and the wage-productivity gap
Although both real wages and productivity have been growing at relatively slow rates during the last two decades, some measures indicate that earnings have failed to keep up with productivity growth. The slowdown in real wage growth is important to workers and their families because their purchasing power is not rising if earnings are not increasing faster than prices. The failure of growth in real wages to match productiv-ity gains also has critical implications for workers. ; A substantial decline in the unionization rate since the 1960s has been cited as underlying the wage-productivity ...