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Journal Article
The Tight Labor Market in the Rocky Mountain Region is Showing Some Signs of Easing
Labor market conditions are showing some early signs of softening, as imbalances between labor demand and supply are improving. While labor markets remain strong in the Rocky Mountain Region, contacts suggest moderating labor market tightness in the coming year. This Rocky Mountain Economist provides an overview of recent regional labor market conditions, and prospects for the regional labor market in 2024 reported by businesses throughout the region.
Working Paper
How Much Should We Trust Regional-Exposure Designs?
Many prominent studies in macroeconomics, labor, and trade use panel data on regions to identify the local effects of aggregate shocks. These studies construct regional-exposure instruments as an observed aggregate shock times an observed regional exposure to that shock. We argue that the most economically plausible source of identification in these settings is uncorrelatedness of observed and unobserved aggregate shocks. Even when the regression estimator is consistent, we show that inference is complicated by cross-regional residual correlations induced by unobserved aggregate shocks. We ...
Working Paper
Partially Disaggregated Household-level Debt Service Ratios: Construction and Validation
Currently published data series on the United States household debt service ratio are constructed from aggregate household debt data provided by lenders and estimates of the average interest rate and loan terms of a range of credit products. The approach used to calculate those debt service ratios could be prone to missing changes in loan terms. Better measurement of this important indicator of financial health can help policymakers anticipate and react to crises in household finance. We develop and estimate debt service ratio measures based on individual-level debt payments data obtained ...
Journal Article
The Phillips Curve during the Pandemic: Bringing Regional Data to Bear
The Phillips curve appears to have held up well at the regional level during the COVID-19 era. Areas of the country that took relatively large hits to their unemployment rate and employment-population ratio during the pandemic have had lower inflation, on average, than areas that took relatively small hits. And, just as prior to the pandemic, the inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment continues to be statistically stronger for the prices of services than of goods.