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Discussion Paper
Businesses in the Tri-State Region Struggling to Weather the Coronavirus Outbreak
As a result of the coronavirus outbreak, New York State, New Jersey, and Connecticut have closed nonessential businesses and schools and asked residents to stay home in an effort to slow the spread of the virus. These actions are unprecedented, and the economic impacts are likely to be temporary but severe, and difficult to track and measure. With conditions changing so rapidly, timely data on the economic impacts of the outbreak and resultant policies on businesses and people are both scarce and important. In this post, we provide some very recent information on the economic effects of the ...
Journal Article
Why Are Some Places So Much More Unequal Than Others?
This study examines the magnitude and sources of regional wage inequality in the United States. The authors find that, as in the nation as a whole, wage inequality has increased in nearly every metropolitan area since the early 1980s, though there is significant variation among places in both the degree of wage inequality and the pace at which it has risen. The most unequal places tend to be large urban areas that have benefited from strong demand for skill and agglomeration economies, with these factors leading to particularly rapid wage growth for high-skilled workers. The least unequal ...
Report
Have amenities become relatively more important than firm productivity advantages in metropolitan areas?
We analyze patterns of compensating differentials to determine whether a region's bundle of site characteristics has a greater net effect on household location decisions relative to firm location decisions in U.S. metropolitan areas over time. We estimate skill-adjusted wages and attribute-adjusted rents using hedonic regressions for 238 metropolitan areas in 1990 and 2000. Within the framework of the standard Roback model, we classify each metropolitan area based on whether amenities or firm productivity advantages dominate and analyze the extent to which these classifications change between ...
Discussion Paper
Where Are Manufacturing Jobs Coming Back?
As we outlined in our previous post, the United States lost close to sixmillion manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010 but since then has gained back almost one million. In this post, we take a closer look at the geographic dimension of this modest rebound in manufacturing jobs. While job losses during the 2000s were fairly widespread across the country, manufacturing employment gains since then have been concentrated in particular parts of the country. Indeed, these gains were especially large in ?auto alley??a narrow motor vehicle production corridor stretching from Michigan south to ...
Report
Do colleges and universities increase their region's human capital?
We investigate whether the degree production and research and development (R&D) activities of colleges and universities are related to the amount and types of human capital present in the metropolitan areas where the institutions are located. We find that degree production has only a small positive relationship with local stocks of human capital, suggesting that migration plays an important role in the geographic distribution of human capital. Moreover, we show that spillovers from academic R&D activities tilt the structure of local labor markets toward occupations requiring innovation and ...
Journal Article
How New York State's agriculture industry is staying competitive
We examine some of the challenges facing New York's agriculture industry and outline some innovative responses. We distinguish between two types of agriculture: commodities and value-added consumer foods. We show that commodities are a small fraction of the agriculture industry in New York State and are not a growing market segment, while value-added goods are the primary products of New York farms and represent a market segment that is growing significantly. We then briefly discuss important strategies that agricultural producers are using to remain competitive, including the adoption of ...
Journal Article
Understanding regional economic growth in the new economy: industry clusters
This article seeks to explain why industry clusters are receiving so much attention. It discusses how and why clusters form, what makes them successful, and why they are believed to contribute to regional economic growth. The article also examines what the evidence on industry clusters suggests about local economic development, and describes strategies used by communities adopting a cluster approach. The final section outlines New York State's efforts to identify the industry clusters that are important to its economy, as well as the challenges faced in this process.
Report
Underemployment in the early careers of college graduates following the Great Recession
Though labor market conditions steadily improved following the Great Recession, underemployment among recent college graduates continued to climb, reaching highs not seen since the early 1990s. In this paper, we take a closer look at the jobs held by underemployed college graduates in the early stages of their careers during the first few years after the Great Recession. Contrary to popular perception, we show that relatively few recent graduates were working in low-skilled service jobs, and that many of the underemployed worked in fairly well paid non-college jobs requiring some degree of ...
Journal Article
The predictive abilities of the New York Fed's Empire State Manufacturing Survey
Business surveys often give early signals of the direction and magnitude of economic activity. One release, the relatively new Empire State Manufacturing Survey, is demonstrating an ability to provide information ahead of U.S. production and employment trends. In fact, the predictive power of this survey appears to be at least equal to that of two established manufacturing surveys. This issue is part of the Second District Highlights series.
Discussion Paper
Foreclosures Loom Large in the Region
Households in the New York-northern New Jersey region were spared the worst of the housing bust and have generally experienced less financial stress than average over the past several years. However, as the housing market has begun to recover both regionally and nationally, the region is faring far worse than the nation in one important respect—a growing backlog of foreclosures is resulting in a foreclosure rate that is now well above the national average. In this blog post, we describe this outsized increase in the region’s foreclosure rate and explain why it has occurred. We then ...