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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.
Newsletter
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 ...
Working Paper
Skills, Migration, and Urban Amenities Over the Life Cycle
We examine sorting behavior across metropolitan areas by skill over individuals’ life cycles. We show that high-skill workers disproportionately sort into high-amenity areas, but do so relatively early in life. Workers of all skill levels tend to move towards lower-amenity areas during their thirties and forties. Consequently, individuals’ time use and expenditures on activities related to local amenities are U-shaped over the life cycle. This contrasts with well-documented life-cycle consumption profiles, which have an opposite inverted-U shape. We present evidence that the move towards ...
Seventh District Year in Review for 2024: Economic Growth Slowed to Near Average
In 2024, economic growth slowed for both the United States and the Seventh Federal Reserve District, with growth rates having come in close to their respective ten-year averages.1 District employment continued to grow more slowly than national employment overall, and this was partly due to slower growth rates for the District in the education and health services sector and the manufacturing sector. One bright spot for District employment was the public sector: Employment in the public sector grew faster than in the private sector, making up for several years of relatively slow job gains ...
Newsletter
Shareholder Power and Workers’ Labor Market Outcomes
Public corporations account for about half of private employment in the United States.1 These large corporations have undergone radical changes in their ownership structure over the past several decades.2 Figure 1 illustrates the changes—total block institutional ownership, defined as the total share of equity owned by all institutional investors that own at least 5% of the shares for public firms, on average increased fourfold from 1980 to 2023. As a result, the block institutional shareholders, on average, held over 20% of the equity shares of U.S. public corporations by the end of the ...