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Working Paper
Racial profiling or racist policing? bounds tests in aggregate data
State-wide reports on police traffic stops and searches summarize very large populations, making them potentially powerful tools for identifying racial bias, particularly when statistics on search outcomes are included. But when the reported statistics conflate searches involving different levels of police discretion, standard tests for racial bias are not applicable. This paper develops a model of police search decisions that allows for non-discretionary searches and derives tests for racial bias in data that mixes different search types. Our tests reject unbiased policing as an explanation ...
Journal Article
Consumer debt and the economic recovery
A key ingredient of an economic recovery is a pickup in household spending supported by increased consumer debt. As the current economic recovery has struggled to take hold, household debt levels have grown little. Some evidence indicates that households adjusted debt in line with house price movements in their local markets. However, the data show that consumer debt cutbacks were largest among households that defaulted on mortgages or had lower credit scores, suggesting that household borrowing also was restricted by tight aggregate credit supply.
Journal Article
Household wealth: has it recovered?
Adjusting for inflation, population growth, and a risk-free real interest rate shows there is still a substantial gap between the peak of household wealth in 2007 and the level today.
Journal Article
The economics of household leveraging and deleveraging
Since the start of the financial crisis of 2007-09, a historically large number of household loans have become delinquent and residential houses have been foreclosed. This situation, coupled with households actively paying down their debt or cutting down on new borrowing, marked the beginning of household deleveraging. In this article, Wenli Li and Susheela Patwari discuss recent theoretical and empirical work by economists that sheds light on the process of leveraging and deleveraging and that helps to provide answers to a number of questions, such as: What determines when and how much a ...
Journal Article
Disagreement among Households May Foreshadow a Rise in Inflation Expectations
Households’ expectations about future inflation can influence realized inflation, so many policymakerstrack median household inflation expectations. However, the median changes slowly if households learnabout economic fundamentals gradually. A widening distribution of household inflation expectations mayforeshadow an increase in the median. During 2021, for example, disagreement about inflationexpectations rose months before the median increased appreciably.
Journal Article
Borrowing by U.S. households
Journal Article
Households during the Great Recession: the financial accelerator in action?
Households are the sector that the financial accelerator appears to have hit hardest, according to the data.
Journal Article
How worrisome is a negative saving rate?
The U.S. personal saving rate's negative turn in 2005 has raised concerns that Americans may have to curtail their spending and accept a lower standard of living as they pay off rising debts. However, a closer look at saving trends suggests that the risks to household well-being are overstated. The surge in energy costs may have temporarily dampened saving, while the accounting of household income from stock holdings may be skewing saving estimates. Moreover, broad measures of saving have remained positive, and household wealth is on the rise.>
Working Paper
Are Millennials Different?
The economic wellbeing of the millennial generation, which entered its working-age years around the time of the 2007-09 recession, has received considerable attention from economists and the popular press. This chapter compares the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of millennials with those of earlier generations and compares their income, saving, and consumption expenditures. Relative to members of earlier generations, millennials are more racially diverse, more educated, and more likely to have deferred marriage; these comparisons are continuations of longer-run trends in the ...
Journal Article
The current state of U.S. household balance sheets
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System is responsible for two of the most widely used datasets containing information about U.S. household balance sheets: the quarterly macro-level Financial Accounts of the United States (FA, formerly known as the Flow of Funds Accounts) and the triennial microlevel Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). The FA is very timely, but the data can be used only to describe the household sector as a whole. The SCF provides the micro-level detail needed to capture heterogeneity in household finances, but the data are available only with a long lag. The ...