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Working Paper
Making Sense of Increased Synchronization in Global House Prices
Evidence indicates that house prices have become somewhat more synchronized during this century, likely reflecting more correlated movements in long-term interest rates and macroeconomic cycles that are related to trends in globalization and international portfolio diversification. Nevertheless, the trend toward increased synchronization has not been continuous, reflecting that house prices depend on other fundamentals, which are not uniform across countries or cities. Theory and limited econometric evidence indicate that the more common are fundamentals, the more in-synch house price cycles ...
Working Paper
The Returns to Public Library Investment
Local governments spend over 12 billion dollars annually funding the operation of 17,000 public libraries in the United States, yet we know little about their effects. We use data describing the near-universe of public libraries to show that public library investment increases children’s attendance at library events by 18%, children’s checkouts of items by 21%, and library visits by 21%. Increases in library use translate into improved test scores in nearby school districts: a $1,000 or greater per-student capital investment in local public libraries increases reading test scores by 0.02 ...
Discussion Paper
Supply Chain Disruptions Have Eased, But Remain a Concern
Supply chain disruptions became a major headache for businesses in the aftermath of the pandemic. Indeed, in October 2021, nearly all firms in our regional business surveys reported at least some difficulty obtaining the supplies they needed. These supply chain disruptions were a key contributor to the surge in inflation that occurred as the economy recovered from the pandemic recession. In this post, we present new measures of supply availability from our Business Leaders Survey and Empire State Manufacturing Survey that closely track the New York Fed’s Global Supply Chain Pressure Index ...
Working Paper
The Returns to Public Library Investment
Local governments spend over 12 billion dollars annually funding the operation of 15,000 public libraries in the United States. This funding supports widespread library use: more than 50% of Americans visit public libraries each year. But despite extensive public investment in libraries, surprisingly little research quantities the effects of public libraries on communities and children. We use data on the near-universe of U.S. public libraries to study the effects of capital spending shocks on library resources, patron usage, student achievement, and local housing prices. We use a dynamic ...
Working Paper
Why is the Hong Kong Housing Market Unaffordable? Some Stylized Facts and Estimations
The house price in Hong Kong is well-known to be "unaffordable." This paper argues that the commonly used house price-to-income ratio may be misleading in an economy with almost half of the population living in either public rental housing or subsidized ownership. Moreover, we re-focus on the relationships between economic fundamentals and the housing market of Hong Kong. While the aggregate GDP, population and longevity continue to grow, the real wage and household income fall behind. The trend component of the real GDP growth suffers a permanent downward shift after the first quarter of ...
Working Paper
Natural Disasters and Real Asset Prices: What Can We Learn From Tornados?
Tornados’ impacts on real asset prices have not been extensively explored in a causal analysis framework. We estimate the effects of damage from a major tornado in Little Rock, AR on prices of nearby non-damaged residential real assets. We study how a typical home’s proximity to damaged properties might have led to a discount in the price of the subject property due to blight in the neighborhood. We focus on homes that sold between January 2022 and August 2024, and compare the effects of the March 31, 2023 tornado on sale prices for homes near versus far from damaged houses. For homes ...
Discussion Paper
Are Businesses Scaling Back Hiring Due to AI?
The swift advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has sparked significant concern that this new technology will replace jobs and stifle hiring. To explore the effects of AI on employment, our August regional business surveys asked firms about their adoption of AI and if they had made any corresponding adjustments to their workforces. Businesses reported a notable increase in AI use over the past year, yet very few firms reported AI-induced layoffs. Indeed, for those already employed, our results indicate AI is more likely to result in retraining than job loss, similar to our findings from ...
Discussion Paper
Many Places Still Have Not Recovered from the Pandemic Recession
More than four years have passed since the onset of the pandemic, which resulted in one of the sharpest and deepest economic downturns in U.S. history. While the nation as a whole has recovered the jobs that were lost during the pandemic recession, many places have not. Indeed, job shortfalls remain in more than a quarter of the country’s metro areas, including many in the New York-Northern New Jersey region. In fact, while employment is well above pre-pandemic levels in Northern New Jersey, jobs have only recently recovered in and around New York City, and most of upstate New York—like ...
Report
Effect of constraints on Tiebout competition: evidence from a school finance reform in the United States
In 1994, Michigan enacted a comprehensive school finance reform that not only significantly increased state aid to low-spending districts, but also placed restraints on the growth of spending in high-spending districts. While a rich literature studies the impact of school finance reforms on resource equalization, test scores, and residential sorting, there is no literature yet on the impact of such reforms on resource allocation by school districts. This study begins to fill this gap. The Michigan reform affords us a unique opportunity to study the impacts of such reforms on resource ...
Working Paper
Gross Migration, Housing and Urban Population Dynamics
Cities experience significant, near random walk productivity shocks, yet population is slow to adjust. In practise local population changes are dominated by variation in net migration, and we argue that understanding gross migration is essential to quantify how net migration may slow population adjustments. Housing is also a natural candidate for slowing population adjustments because it is difficult to move, costly to build quickly, and a large durable stock makes a city attractive to potential migrants. We quantify the influence of migration and housing on urban population dynamics using a ...