Search Results
Briefing
Who Should Get Vaccines First?
We study optimal vaccination policies using a novel theoretical framework. We characterize the optimal vaccine allocation scheme in our model, which entails giving the highest priority to people with intermediate vulnerability and giving greater weight to potential exposure rather than vulnerability. Numerical results demonstrate that this approach performs significantly better than commonly considered strategies, in particular prioritizing only people who are the most vulnerable to severe illness.
Briefing
College-Educated Immigrants Bolster U.S. Productivity
The United States is the largest destination in the world for college-educated immigrants, but their path to employment in this country has become increasingly difficult during the past decade, a condition that can hinder productivity growth. This brief discusses the main contributions that college-educated immigrants make to U.S. productivity growth, such as providing scarce skills that supplement and complement those of native workers, contributing disproportionately to innovation and promoting job creation in the United States by foreign-based multinational corporations.
Briefing
Lifespan Inequality and Social Security Reform
What does lifespan inequality mean for Social Security reform? Using a life-cycle model in which the rich tend to outlive the poor, the researchers analyze how various reforms affect the trade-off between distributing lifetime Social Security benefits more equally and encouraging society's most productive members to work longer. They find that social welfare is maximized when benefits are independent of lifetime earnings, the payroll tax cap remains near its current level, and benefits are made less dependent on the age at which they are initially claimed.
Briefing
Delving into Climate Change Economics
By quantifying climate change's effects and assessing potential mitigation and adaptation techniques, economists contribute valuable perspectives to political, ecological and social conversations about the planet's future. This Economic Brief summarizes presentations from the Richmond Fed's recent conference on the economics of climate change.
Briefing
Seek and Ye Shall Not Find: The Absence of Hysteresis in U.S. Macroeconomic Data
Economists are keenly interested in longer-run economic phenomena that interact with short-run shocks and business cycles. A particularly well-known example is hysteresis, which posits that disturbances typically thought of as transitory actually can have permanent effects. While this concept is well-recognized in theoretical modeling, empirical evidence has been sparse. After conducting a thorough analysis of U.S. macroeconomic data, we conclude that there has been no hysteresis in the United States for the past 60 years.
Briefing
Predicting Recessions
This Economic Brief evaluates the predictive capabilities of the yield curve and several other leading indicators, including the Conference Board Leading Economic Index (LEI), claims for unemployment insurance, manufacturing activity, consumer lending, and CEO optimism. According to in-sample statistical analysis, several indicators — particularly the three-month/ten-year term spread and the LEI — have demonstrated significant value in predicting recessions during the past sixty years.
Briefing
Why Don't Low-Income Countries Adopt More Productive Technologies?
Researchers at UCLA, the Richmond Fed and Washington University in St. Louis have developed a theory of economic development in which complementarity in firms' technology-adoption decisions can substantially amplify the negative impacts of distortions in the economy and play an important role in explaining income differences across countries. By integrating theories that separately emphasize the roles of coordination failures and distortions, their unified framework shows that reducing distortions within "big push" regions could unleash massive economic growth.