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Discussion Paper
How Different Are Rural and Urban Small Businesses?
Small businesses play a big part in rural communities. In addition to serving local demand, businesses with fewer than 500 employees account for over half of rural employment. As part of the Richmond Fed's mission to strengthen the economy and our communities, we work to understand economic and business conditions in small towns and rural communities. This includes understanding how rural businesses in the Fifth District are faring and keeping a pulse on the financial health of rural small businesses. Using newly released data from the Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS), a national data ...
Discussion Paper
Remotely Interesting? Sensing Tools Shed Light on On-Site Expectations in the Fifth District
The Richmond Fed uses a set of tools to continually gather information on economic activity across our Fifth District. These sensing tools include our industry roundtable conversations with business and community leaders and our monthly business surveys. In addition to collecting regular data on indicators such as wage growth and price changes, we are also keeping a pulse on timely topics that play into firm decision-making. One key pattern we've monitored is the intensity of remote work and return-to-office decisions, as businesses and workers have navigated pandemic-era uncertainty and a ...
Discussion Paper
How Does USDA Funding Flow into the Fifth District?
Federal funding for economic and community development in rural communities is distributed across over 400 programs. But one agency is technically charged with directing rural policy: the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). In a fragmented federal funding landscape, USDA Rural Development (RD) is the largest source of federal funding for rural economic and community development. To understand how changes to USDA funding might flow through to national and Fifth District communities, it's important to understand where money has gone in the past. How much money are we talking about when we talk ...
Discussion Paper
Barriers to Rural Investment
Investment is a critical part of any healthy, growing economy, but the geography of investment can be uneven. Rural areas can face a particularly acute mismatch between the various actors supplying community development investment (supply-side barriers) and communities seeking investment dollars (demand-side barriers).
Discussion Paper
Automation and AI: What Does Adoption Look Like for Fifth District Businesses?
Technological developments shift the kinds of skills needed in the labor force. From innovations in agriculture to electricity to the personal computer to the internet, technology has shaped the way we work and the types of workers we need to produce the goods and provide the services that consumers demand. The tight labor market of the last few years has provided employers with further incentive to find ways to use automation to increase the productivity of existing workers and even reduce the need to hire more. The opportunities of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI, ...
Discussion Paper
COVID-19 Financial Support: Who’s Covered and Who’s Not?
Federal, state, and local government financial support for consumers in response to COVID-19 is widespread, but not universal. Who’s left out from existing governmental support programs?
Discussion Paper
Credit Checkup: A Look at the Financing Experiences of Small Businesses in Virginia, Washington, D.C., and North Carolina
There are about 6.3 million businesses with employees (or "employer firms") across the United States, and just over half a million of those firms are located in the Richmond Fed's Fifth District, which includes Maryland, the District of Columbia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and most of West Virginia. Financing can play a critical role in the health of these businesses, and small business credit access is among the community development finance research topics that the Richmond Fed prioritizes to help support economic vitality in communities.
Discussion Paper
Under Pressure: Small-Business Lenders and COVID-19
Small-business lenders are on the front lines of financial support for small businesses through the COVID-19 pandemic. What are these lenders experiencing right now, and how are they working to support small businesses?
Journal Article
Rural Hospital Closures and the Fifth District
District Digest Article on : Rural Hospital Closures and the Fifth District