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Speech
Benjamin Franklin Birthday Celebration
Barriers to economic mobility prevent many low-income children from reaching their potential, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia President Patrick T. Harker said today in remarks delivered at the Ben Franklin Birthday Celebration. President Harker said that understanding these barriers is integral to fostering growth across demographics
Report
Student Loan Trends in the Third Federal Reserve District
The state of the student loan market has received much attention in recent years, as the number of borrowers and their collective debt have risen dramatically. These trends have been particularly problematic in the wake of the 2007?09 recession because increased unemployment and suppressed income impair borrowers? ability to make payments on their loans. This report outlines the recent history of student borrowing in the Third Federal Reserve District and explores lending patterns, by the neighborhood income of the borrower, to better understand the implications for low- and moderate-income ...
Journal Article
Health Care is Community Reinvestment: Examples from the Mental Health Field
This article examines several case studies of mental health clinics and their relationships with financial institutions for CRA purposes.
Journal Article
Revitalizing Commercial Corridors: Lessons from LISC MetroEdge
In many low- and moderate-income communities, existing retail strips are underutilized or a shadow of their former selves, with vacant storefronts and a limited range of goods. Coordinated efforts by community-based organizations, local business owners, and municipal partners can create conditions to revitalize these strips and to spur economic growth by upgrading the physical surroundings, supporting existing businesses, attracting new stores, and improving the reputation of the community as a place to shop. As businesses grow, they provide a wider array of retail options to residents, add ...
Journal Article
Community Land Trust Model: Opportunities and Challenges of Preserving Affordable Housing
At least a dozen low-income apartment buildings exclusively for seniors in Detroit?s midtown and downtown areas could convert to market rate apartments in the next ten years, forcing hundreds of seniors to find new homes. Many of the senior apartment buildings were filled in the 1980s when few people wanted to live downtown. Senior subsidies paid by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) comprise one way to keep a level of density in the central districts. Today, stories of young professionals unable to find affordable housing in these high-profile neighborhoods (known as ...
Journal Article
Spotlight on Research: Youth Debt and College Graduation
The rise in debt among youth to finance their higher education has engendered a great deal of discussion. Much of the attention has been focused on the angst that arises when the debt has to be repaid. This has been especially burdensome on students from lower-income households. While this is worthy of concern, another aspect of the educational-related debt that is being examined is whether the debt was worth it. More specifically, what is the association of the debt with the borrower?s graduation from college? Some investigations not only consider the relationship between educational loans ...
Journal Article
Building CDFI Capacity in Lending and Business Models
Over the past three decades, community development financial institutions (CDFIs) have been nimble innovators, offering products and services to people, projects, and organizations that mainstream financial institutions could not or would not serve. They opened new lending pathways to address some of the most stubborn challenges facing poor communities across the country. The focus of CDFIs was originally on financing affordable housing and then shifted in recent years to financing schools and child-care centers, healthful food markets, small and microbusinesses, and community health centers.
Journal Article
Reinventing Older Communities: Bridging Growth & Opportunity
How can economic growth create better job, education, and housing opportunities for low-income people and communities? The sixth biennial Reinventing Older Communities conference probed strategies to create opportunities in education, employment, revitalization, and other areas. Recurring themes were the importance of collaboration and partnership with different sectors and of ongoing data collection and analysis to identify issues and measure progress in addressing them
Journal Article
Pay for Success: Financing Research-Informed Practice
Undercapitalization of nonprofit organizations and years of seemingly stagnant results in addressing certain social problems have led many to hope that ?pay for success (PFS) financing? will bring solutions in the form of new capital to support program delivery, improved accountability, and increased rigor in performance measurement. PFS financing, sometimes termed ?social impact bonds (SIBs),? shifts the risk of a preventive social service?s success from taxpayers to investors who finance programs and receive government repayments if, and only if, an agreed-upon performance metric is ...
Working Paper
Does Physician Pay Affect Procedure Choice and Patient Health? Evidence from Medicaid C-section Use
I investigate the relationship between physician pay, C-section use, and infant health, using vital statistics data and newly collected data on Medicaid payments to physicians. First, I confirm past results?when Medicaid pays doctors relatively more for C-sections, they perform them more often. I bolster the causal interpretation of this result by showing that salaried doctors do not respond to this pay differential, and by using a much larger sample of states and years. Second, unlike past work, I look at how changing physician pay affects infant health outcomes. I find that increased ...