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Discussion Paper
Firms' Employment and Wage Outlook Going Into 2025
Every November, the Richmond Fed asks businesses a series of questions about their expectations for hiring, wage adjustments, and other employment-related topics. This year, in addition to the usual set of questions, we asked firms if they have reduced the size of their workforce over the past three months and what workforce decisions they would make if business conditions deteriorated in the next six months.Consistent with past results, most responding businesses expect to maintain or increase employee headcount over the next 12 months. However, there were some shifts in responses compared ...
Briefing
Commuting Patterns and Economic Connectivity in the Fifth District
One way of measuring economic connectivity across locations is by examining the commuting behavior of residents. This article explores how connected counties in the Fifth District are by focusing on commuting.
Discussion Paper
How Might Fifth District Firms React to Changing Tariff Policies?
In March 2025, the U.S. implemented a 20 percent tariff on all imports from China and an additional 25 percent tariff on all steel and aluminum imports. The administration has also announced additional 25 percent tariffs on goods imported from Canada and Mexico to be implemented in April 2025 and proposed a set of tariffs targeting the European Union and automotive imports.In order to better understand how these implemented and proposed tariffs might affect firms in the Fifth District, we included questions about the impact of tariffs in our March business survey, which was fielded from Feb. ...
Discussion Paper
Households Confront the End of Pandemic-Era Assistance Programs
The U.S. government, beginning in March 2020, took extraordinary measures in response to the emergence and spread of the novel coronavirus. Through policy changes and major spending bills, the federal government directed funds to help states, localities, and households manage the economic challenges caused by the pandemic. Two of the many measures that the government took to directly aid households were increasing the flexibility and benefits of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and pausing federal student loan payments. Now that enhanced SNAP benefits have ended and ...
Journal Article
At the Richmond Fed: Community Conversations
When Tom Barkin became president of the Richmond Fed in 2018, he made it his goal to spend time in every part of the Fifth District to stay well-informed about its communities. (See "Learning From Our District,") One of the ways the Richmond Fed's research department supports this goal is through an event series known as Community Conversations. These are one- or two-day road trips to visit with business and community leaders and learn about an area's challenges and successes.
Discussion Paper
The Impact of the Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapse on Fifth District Firms
The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, on March 26 killed six people, severed a major interstate highway, and temporarily closed the Port of Baltimore. This Macro Minute blog post last month discussed potential regional economic effects as well as several reasons to be hopeful for the port's long-term recovery upon reopening.Between March 28 and April 17 in our April manufacturing and service sector surveys, to assess its immediate economic impact, we asked Fifth District firms to report if and how the bridge collapse will impact their businesses. Overall, 30 ...
Discussion Paper
Shifting Rurality: Is it Possible to Increase Population and Become More Rural?
In January, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service (USDA-ERS) released the 2023 update of the Rural-Urban Continuum Codes (RUCCs), resulting in changes for many counties, including those in the Fifth District. The USDA-ERS developed the nine-code classification system in 1974 to identify a county's level of rurality based on its degree of urbanization and adjacency to a metro area: RUCC 1 is the least rural, and RUCC 9 is the most rural. Following each decennial census, the USDA-ERS does a full update of the RUCCs to reflect population and metro/nonmetro area changes. ...
Discussion Paper
Fifth District Firms and the Prospect of Higher Input Prices
Since the middle of 2023, firms' year-ahead input price growth expectations have been relatively steady, hovering around 3 percent for manufacturers and between 4 to 5 percent for service providers. However, recent developments in trade and tariff policy have introduced new uncertainty into firms' decision-making. In December, our surveys showed little evidence that this uncertainty had made its way into firms' price or cost growth expectations. Data from our February surveys show a slight uptick in firms' expected growth in the prices they pay their suppliers.In addition to the slight uptick ...
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
High and Dry: Banking Deserts Increased in the Fifth District During the Pandemic
The number of U.S. bank branches has been shrinking for years, but the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the rate of closures. After the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994 allowed banks to open branches across state lines, branch networks spread steadily across the country. That expansion continued until the Great Recession, after which banks moved from growing their physical footprints to increasing their automated services, like ATMs and online banking.