Search Results
Supply-Chain Woes, Labor Shortages and COVID-19 Slow Resilient Texas Economy
Regional economic growth has slowed, though it remains robust by historical standards. While demand has improved from year-ago levels, supply-chain disruptions and labor shortages have limited output growth and pushed up wages and prices.
Report
CFI COVID-19 Survey of Consumers — Relief Programs, Vaccines, and the Effects of the Crisis on Renters and Mortgage Holders
In an effort to gain insights into the impact of COVID-19 on financial security in the U.S., the Consumer Finance Institute at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia is conducting a series of national surveys of consumers that focus on changes in job status, income levels, and personal financial security. Data presented here represent results from the seventh wave of the survey conducted between January 4 and 15, 2021
Journal Article
The Pandemic Mortgage Boom
We learn a lot about the mortgage market by understanding why it defied expectations during the pandemic
Report
1CFI COVID-19 Survey of Consumers — Employment, Income, and Financial Security as of October 2021
This report shares results from Wave 10 of a national survey of consumers investigating the effects of COVID-19 on employment and income data, including employment through the crisis, income changes and expectations for income in 2021, and financial security over the next three to 12 months.
Briefing
Profits and Inflation in the Time of COVID
Following the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020, inflation accelerated in 2021-22 and peaked at roughly 7 percent in mid-2022. This was an inflation rate not seen since the early 1980s. Among the many accounts of this increase that have been introduced, one attributes the increase to firms being greedy and exploiting supply chain disruptions to raise their prices excessively. In this article, I first argue that a frequent piece of evidence in support of "greedflation" — the increased share of gross operating surplus in the nonfinancial corporate business (NFCB) sector — is not that ...
Journal Article
Regional Spotlight: State Business Cycles vs. COVID
Our state business cycle dating algorithm was no match for COVID-19.
Working Paper
Corporate Bond Issuance Over Financial Stress Episodes: A Global Perspective
We use a merged global data set of security-level corporate bond issuance and firm-level financial statement data to show that, in contrast to earlier periods of financial stress, during the COVID pandemic nonfinancial firms around the world were more likely to issue bonds, driven by a boom in local-currency-denominated issuance. We observe a distinct cross-regional difference in the characteristics of issuing firms, finding that in advanced economies issuance during COVID was driven by less risky firms, as predicted by existing theories; in emerging markets, only issuance of U.S. dollar ...
Briefing
COVID Transfers Dampening Employment Growth, but Not Necessarily a Bad Thing
Overall employment levels have remained below their pre-pandemic level and are growing only slowly despite rising wages and vacancies. In this Economic Brief, we examine whether historically high government support may have empowered workers to pull back from labor markets. While that support presents a clear benefit to recipients, a simple calculation based on recent estimates indicates that transfers of close to $2 trillion to households approved over the course of 2020 and 2021 implies a reduction of 0.58 percentage points in the employment-to-population ratio.
Journal Article
COVID and Cities, Thus Far
Key reasons for the existence of cities are the externalities created when people cluster together in close proximity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, such interactions came with health risks and people found other ways to interact. This article documents how cities changed during COVID-19 and considers how the persistence of new ways of interacting, particularly remote work, will shape the development of cities in the future. It first summarizes evidence showing how residential and commercial prices and activity adjusted at different distances from dense city centers during and since the ...