Search Results
Working Paper
Snow Belt to Sun Belt Migration: End of an Era?
Internal migration has been cited as a key channel by which societies will adapt to climate change. We show in this paper that this process has already been happening in the United States. Over the course of the past 50 years, the tendency of Americans to move from the coldest places (“snow belt”), which have become warmer, to the hottest places (“sun belt”), which have become hotter, has steadily declined. In the latest full decade, 2010-2020, both county population growth and county net migration rates were essentially uncorrelated with the historical means of either extreme heat ...
Working Paper
The Postpandemic U.S. Immigration Surge: New Facts and Inflationary Implications
The U.S. experienced an extraordinary postpandemic surge in unauthorized immigration. This paper combines administrative data on border encounters and immigration court records with household survey data to document two new facts about these immigrants: They tend to be hand-to-mouth consumers and low-skilled workers that complement the existing workforce. We build these features into a model with capital, household heterogeneity and population growth to study the inflationary effects of this episode. Contrary to the popular view, we find little effect on inflation, as the increase in supply ...
U.S. Population Growth Slowed Further in 2020
This year will likely be the slowest annual population increase in U.S. history outside of wartime.
How Successful Is Your Region at Retaining Its Native Residents?
This District Data Brief analyzes how well regions in the Fourth District and across the United States retain their native residents and whether their retention rates are associated with population growth.
Briefing
Secular Trends in Macroeconomics and Firm Dynamics: A Conference Recap
How does declining population growth affect firm dynamics? Is income growth volatility decreasing in the U.S.? How do changes in housing prices affect young businesses? Have investments in artificial intelligence improved productivity? These were among the questions addressed by economists during a recent Richmond Fed research conference.
Journal Article
From Brain Drain to Brain Gain, Oklahoma’s Population on the Rise
This edition of Oklahoma Economist examines multiple sources of state migration data to quantify the drivers of the state’s population growth. It finds the recent surge of new residents was driven primarily by historic levels of domestic migration from states in the western half of the U.S., as well as a reversal of the “brain drain” that plagued the state for much of the 2010s.
Discussion Paper
Migration in Puerto Rico: Is There a Brain Drain?
Given Puerto Rico’s long-term economic malaise and ongoing fiscal crisis, it is no wonder that out-migration of the Island’s residents has picked up. Over the past five years alone, migration has resulted in a net outflow of almost 300,000 people, a staggering loss. It would make matters worse, however, if Puerto Rico were losing an outsized share of its highest-paid workers. But we find that, if anything, Puerto Rico’s migrants are actually tilted somewhat toward the lower end of the skills and earnings spectrum. Still, such a large outflow of potentially productive workers and ...
Journal Article
Was China's Housing Boom a Bubble?
This article investigates the factors influencing nationwide and city-level house price trends in China during the 2000s and early 2010s, considering the country’s significant structural transformation and urbanization. The analysis reveals that "fundamental forces" effectively explain house price appreciation at the national level and in most cities, with Beijing and Shanghai being notable exceptions. Income growth is the primary driver of rising house prices, while population growth also plays a significant role. However, in many cases, the impact of population growth on house prices is ...
Journal Article
Population Turnover and the Growth of Urban Areas
People in the United States are relocating nearly half as much they did in the early 1980s. Lower population turnover—the propensity of people to move into or out of a given location—may mean a decline in labor market adjustment across industries and occupations; when people move across regions for job-related reasons, they may help smooth out changes that hit certain labor markets harder than others. Population turnover may also lead to better matches between employer and employee, an important factor in the growth of urban areas.Jason P. Brown and Colton Tousey examine the relationship ...
Working Paper
Demographics and Real Interest Rates Across Countries and Over Time
We propose that the natural rate of unemployment may have an active role in the business cycle, in contrast to a widespread view that the rate is fairly smooth and at most only weakly cyclical. We demonstrate that the tendency to treat the natural rate as near-constant would explain the surprisingly low slope of the Phillips curve. We observe that evidence is weak about this basic point–the evidence neither comes close to rejecting the conventional view nor does it reject a very different view in which fluctuations in the natural rate are associated with a substantial fraction of cyclical ...