Search Results
Journal Article
Housing's Role in the Slow Recovery
Why did homebuilding recover so slowly after the Great Recession? Burcu Eyigungor examines some unusual supply and demand factors during the boom and bust and explores why home construction is so important to economic recoveries.
Journal Article
Uneven Consumption Growth in the COVID-19 Economic Recovery
Are richer households driving the boom in post-pandemic consumption? It may be the case in the U.S., as consumption growth is faster in goods and services with higher income elasticity.
Speech
Economic Fragility: Implications for Recovery from the Pandemic
President Rosengren’s comments were delivered as part of the Annual Regional and Community Bankers Conference, and were based on a speech he delivered on October 8, 2020 for the Marburg Memorial Lecture, Marquette University Economics Department.
Speech
Ethics and economics: making cyclical downturns less severe: remarks at the Fourth Annual O. John Olcay Lecture on Ethics and Economics, Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington, D.C., June 27, 2018
Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren said the costs of high unemployment are disproportionately borne by those that can least afford them, and a variety of actions could be taken by policymakers to make periods of high unemployment less likely.
Journal Article
What's holding back homebuilding?
Homebuilding is typically a casualty of economic downturns, but it is also true that most economic recoveries are built upon a resumption of pounding hammers and buzzing blades. Not so with the recovery from the Great Recession. After new home construction slowed dramatically in the recession, the sector not only failed to lead the overall recovery as usual but significantly lagged it. Even now that overall economic growth and employment have largely resumed growing solidly, homebuilding and construction employment levels remain far below normal in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware as ...
Journal Article
Productivity During and Since the Pandemic
U.S. labor productivity initially surged in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the massive economic upheaval. As the economy recovered, the level of productivity retreated to its slow pre-pandemic trend. As of mid-2024, it remained close to but just above that trend. The surge and retreat in productivity follows the pre-pandemic cyclical relationship in which U.S. productivity rises temporarily in recessions. This example highlights the need to look through temporary cyclical effects when trying to infer longer-run trends.
Report
The Effect of the Central Bank Liquidity Support during Pandemics: Evidence from the 1918 Influenza Pandemic
The coronavirus outbreak raises the question of how central bank liquidity support affects financial stability and promotes economic recovery. Using newly assembled data on cross-county flu mortality rates and state-charter bank balance sheets in New York State, we investigate the effects of the 1918 influenza pandemic on the banking system and the role of the Federal Reserve during the pandemic. We find that banks located in more severely affected areas experienced deposit withdrawals. Banks that were members of the Federal Reserve System were able to access central bank liquidity, enabling ...
Discussion Paper
The Devastation of Hurricane Helene: The Fifth District
The impact of Hurricane Helene is still reverberating across the Southeast with each day bringing new revelations of the catastrophic damage to communities in the Fifth District. After making landfall on Sept. 26 in Florida, the storm moved inland, bringing wind gusts and historic levels of rainfall that destroyed homes, businesses, landscapes, and critical infrastructure, and left some areas of our district unrecognizable. The loss of life — more than 230 people as of the writing of this post — makes Hurricane Helene the deadliest mainland hurricane in the United States since Hurricane ...
Speech
Bullard Discusses Economic Outlook, Federal Debt, Currency Competition
St. Louis Fed President James Bullard shared his views on the policy responses to the pandemic, the U.S. economic outlook, debt-to-GDP ratios and currency competition. He spoke during a moderated panel discussion at the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) Economic Policy Conference.
Journal Article
Federal Government Outlays Remain Historically Elevated, Spurred by Robust Transfers
Over the past six decades, the federal government has shifted a larger share of its outlays toward transfer payments to individuals and state and local governments. These longer-run trends were exacerbated during the pandemic, leading to higher deficits for the federal government and an increasingly high share of federal outlays supporting the economy through consumer spending.