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CDFIs: Crucial Partners in the Public Finance Ecosystem
Community development financial institutions (CDFIs) are vital partners with state and local governments in projects aimed at assisting communities of people with low and moderate incomes (LMI communities) across the United States. Serving as intermediaries between public, philanthropic, and private sources of capital, CDFIs help deploy resources to improve economic opportunity in these communities. Government entities at all levels (federal, state, and local) work with nongovernmental actors, and CDFIs have been such partners, particularly for investments related to infrastructure as well as ...
How Do Manufacturers Decide When to Invest in New Equipment?
Although purchasing more and better capital leads to higher productivity, explanations for when and why firms choose to adopt new technology are not straightforward. In this article, we shed some light on how manufacturers choose to adopt new technology by purchasing equipment. The decision can be complicated, so we surveyed manufacturers to get insights into how they approach it. We find that the top two reasons manufacturers invest in new equipment with advanced technology is to keep up with competitors and save on labor costs. But upgrading is not always an obvious choice. Manufacturers ...
Working Paper
Federal Reserve Structure, Economic Ideas, and Banking Policy During the "Quiet Period" in Banking
We evaluate the decentralized structure of the Federal Reserve System as a mechanism for generating and processing new ideas on banking policy in the 1950s and 1960s. We document that demand for research and analysis was driven by banking industry developments and legal changes that required the Federal Reserve and other banking regulatory agencies to develop guidelines for bank mergers. In response to these developments, the Board and the Reserve Banks hired industrial organization economists and young economists out of graduate school who brought in the leading theory of industrial ...
Working Paper
The dynamics of market structure and market size in two health services industries
The relationship between the size of a market and the competitiveness of the market has been of long-standing interest to IO economists. Empirical studies have used the relationship between the size of the geographic market and both the number of firms in the market and the average sales of the firms to draw inferences about the degree of competition in the market. This paper extends this framework to incorporate the analysis of entry and exit flows. A key implication of recent entry and exit models is that current market structure will likely depend upon the history of past participation. ...
Newsletter
Why the Automotive Chip Crisis Isn't Over (Yet)
New car buyers face limited inventory, long order wait times, and rising prices primarily because of lingering automotive supply chain disruptions. It is difficult for automakers to produce enough vehicles to meet demand, and the main culprit is reported to be the lack of semiconductors—or chips. Professional forecasters have ratcheted down their sales and production predictions as the months go by, and the supply-constrained conditions have not returned to pre-pandemic levels. In this article, I investigate why the chip crisis is still with us and why some forecasts suggest that it will ...
Tracking Holiday Spending with CARTS 2.2 and a New Dashboard
In this Chicago Fed Insights article, we provide an update on the Chicago Fed Advance Retail Trade Summary (CARTS). CARTS is a summary measure of multiple high-frequency consumer spending indicators that aims to improve on the timeliness and reliability of traditional measures of U.S. retail spending.