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Discussion Paper
How Do Firms Respond to Hiring Difficulties? Evidence from the Federal Reserve Banks' Small Business Credit Survey
Using data from the Federal Reserve Banks' 2017 Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS), this paper investigates the various ways in which different types of firms with less than 500 employees experience and address hiring difficulties, including when they decide to increase compensation. {{p}} The authors find significant variation in hiring difficulties by type of firm, and a firm's response appears to depend on the nature of the problem. The most common response is to increase compensation, with firms that experience competition from other employers being the most likely to do so. Other common ...
Discussion Paper
Hiring Difficulties across Industries and Location
In the current tight labor market with low levels of unemployment, it is not surprising that a large share of firms experience difficulty hiring candidates for open positions. However, much is unclear about the extent of these difficulties, their underlying reasons, and how firms respond. Using data from the Federal Reserve Banks' national 2017 Small Business Credit Survey, a recent paper examines the nature of firms' hiring difficulties and how they vary by industry and geographic location. The paper also explores how the reasons behind hiring difficulties relate to firms' responses. The ...
Discussion Paper
The Digital Divide and the Pandemic: Working from Home and Broadband and Internet Access
The industrial makeup of a metropolitan area or state is an important factor in how it experiences economic disruptions, and concentrations of certain industries in a region make it more or less resilient and can affect its ability to rebound from a negative economic shock. Similar to effects felt in the industrial Midwest by other economic shifts and shocks over the last several decades, we know these places with heavily “nontraded” sector economies are likely feeling disproportionately negative economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. While industrial composition—meaning the key ...
Discussion Paper
Mind the Gap: How Do Credit Market Experiences and Borrowing Patterns Differ for Minority-Owned Firms?
Given the relationship between a small business’s access to financing and its outcomes, and given the growing share of minorities in the U.S. population, it is important that creditworthy firms and entrepreneurs, irrespective of race or ethnicity, are able to secure adequate financial resources to achieve growth and success. This paper employs data from the Federal Reserve System’s 2016 Small Business Credit Survey to explore under what conditions credit market experiences differ for various racial and ethnic ownership groups of small employer firms.The authors find evidence for ...
Discussion Paper
Mind the Gap: Minority-Owned Small Businesses' Financing Experiences in 2018
This second article explores disparities in small business credit approval by race and ethnicity.
Report
Uneven Opportunity: Exploring Employers’ Educational Preferences for Middle-Skills Jobs
This analysis follows research published in 2015 by the Federal Reserve Banks of Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Atlanta on ?opportunity occupations,? which are defined as occupations that pay at least the national annual median wage, adjusted for differences in local consumption prices, and that are generally considered accessible to a worker without a four-year college degree (Wardrip et al., 2015). Among the primary findings in the original research is that, in online job advertisements, employers often express a preference for a college-educated candidate even for occupations that have not ...
Discussion Paper
Promising Workforce Development Approaches
On November 9, 2018, at the New York Fed, three expert panels discussed promising approaches to investing in workforce development as part of the launch of the three-volume book Investing in America’s Workforce: Improving Outcomes for Workers and Employers. Read highlights from the discussions below.
Discussion Paper
How Do Firms Respond to Hiring Difficulties?
Using data from the Federal Reserve Banks' 2017 Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS), this paper investigates the various ways in which different types of firms with less than 500 employees experience and address hiring difficulties, including when they decide to increase compensation.The authors find significant variation in hiring difficulties by type of firm, and a firm's response appears to depend on the nature of the problem. The most common response is to increase compensation, with firms that experience competition from other employers being the most likely to do so. Other common ...
Discussion Paper
Opportunity Occupations: Well-Paying Jobs for Middle-Skill Workers
Did you know that only 29.7 percent of Americans over the age of 25 have attained a four-year college degree? Given many policymakers' focus on increasing the share of individuals who attain a degree, that may sound like a surprisingly low number. It leaves a large group of American workers who do not have a four-year degree and lack the means or desire to obtain one in the current labor market. In fact, "middle-skill" Americans, defined as those who have obtained their high school diploma but not a four-year college degree, comprise some 57 percent of the country's total population of those ...
Working Paper
Decomposing Outcome Differences between HBCU and Non-HBCU Institutions
This paper investigates differences in outcomes between historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) and traditional college and universities (non-HBCUs) using a standard Oaxaca/Blinder decomposition. This method decomposes differences in observed educational and labor market outcomes between HBCU and non-HBCU students into differences in characteristics (both student and institutional) and differences in how those characteristics translate into differential outcomes. Efforts to control for differences in unobservables between the two types of students are undertaken through ...