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Speech
Remarks at the New York Fed’s Economic Press Briefing on the Household Debt and Credit Report
Remarks at the New York Fed?s Economic Press Briefing, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York City.
Discussion Paper
What About Spending on Consumer Goods?
In a recent Liberty Street Economics post, I showed that one major category of consumer spending?spending on discretionary services such as recreation, transportation, and household utilities?behaved very differently in the 2007-09 recession and subsequent recovery than in previous business cycles: specifically, it fell more steeply and has recovered much more slowly. This finding prompted one of the editors of this blog to inquire whether consumer goods spending has also departed markedly from its behavior in past cycles. To answer that question, I examined the decline of expenditures on ...
Speech
A Tale of Many Economies
Remarks at University at Albany?SUNY, Albany, New York.
Industry Concentration May Help Explain Divergent Business Cycles
U.S. states with high concentrations of certain industries may help explain why these areas diverge from the national cycle of recessions or expansions.
Report
Mapping a Sector’s Scope Transformation and the Value of Following the Evolving Core
A surprisingly neglected facet of sector evolution is the evolutionary analysis of firms’, and thus a sector’s, scope. Defining a sector as a group of firms that can change their scope over time, we study the transformation of U.S. banking firms. We undertake a sectoral, population-wide study of business-scope transformation, with particular focus on which segments banks expand into. As financial intermediation evolved, a continuously shifting set of activities became associated with “core banking,” with scope changing and relatedness itself (measured through coincidence) evolving ...
Journal Article
Do Longer Expansions Lead to More Severe Recessions?
We are now in one of the longest expansions on record. The recession that preceded that expansion was one of the worst in history. Are those two facts related? Some economists suggest they are, while others suggest it?s the other way around: Longer expansions lead to more severe recessions. We assess the evidence for these two hypotheses. We find clear evidence for the former and little for the latter. Deeper recessions are often followed by stronger recoveries, while longer and stronger expansions are not followed by deeper recessions.