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Immigration and the Labor Market in the Post-Pandemic Recovery
Standard estimates based on the main household survey used to shed light on labor markets—the Current Population Survey (CPS)—suggest that after a significant drop during the pandemic, recent rapid growth has brought the foreign-born population in the United States back to, or above, levels predicted by the pre-pandemic trend. However, we document that the weighting factors used to make the CPS nationally representative have recently displayed some unusual movements and conclude that standard estimates of the foreign-born population may currently be too high.
Working Paper
Local Ties in Spatial Equilibrium
If someone lives in an economically depressed place, they were probably born there. The presence of people with local ties - a preference to live in their birthplace - leads to smaller migration responses. Smaller migration responses to wage declines lead to lower real incomes and make real incomes more sensitive to subsequent demand shocks, a form of hysteresis. Local ties can persist for generations. Place-based policies, like tax subsidies, targeting depressed places cause smaller distortions since few people want to move to depressed places. Place-based policies targeting productive ...
An Update on the Status of Remote Work from the Chicago Fed Survey of Economic Conditions
In many ways, people's lives have returned to the way they were before the pandemic. However, the rise of remote work appears to be one lasting change. In this article, we update a Midwest Economy post from August 2021, and show that across all sectors, many firms have a higher level of remote work than before the pandemic. Our results come from the Chicago Fed Survey of Economic Conditions (CFSEC), in which we asked about remote work from July 2021 through March 2024.