Search Results
Working Paper
Regional Dissent: Do Local Economic Conditions Influence FOMC Votes?
U.S. monetary-policy decisions are made by the 12 voting members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). Seven of these members, coming from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, inherently represent national-level interests. The remaining five members, a rotating group of presidents from the 12 Federal Reserve districts, come instead from sub-national jurisdictions. Does this structure have relevant implications for the monetary policy-making process? In this paper, we first build a panel dataset on economic activity across Fed districts. We then provide evidence that regional ...
Urban and Regional Migration Estimates, Second Quarter 2023 Update
This Data Brief updates the figures that appeared in "Urban and Regional Migration Estimates: Will Your City Recover from the Pandemic?" with data for 2023 Q2 for all series. Migration estimates will enable us to track which urban neighborhoods and metro areas are returning to their old migration patterns and where the pandemic has permanently shifted migration trends.
Working Paper
Recent Employment Growth in Cities, Suburbs, and Rural Communities
This paper uses a comprehensive source of yearly data to study private-sector labor demand across US counties during the past five decades. Our focus is on how employment levels and earnings relate to population density—that is, how labor markets in rural areas, suburbs, and cities have fared relative to one another. Three broad lessons emerge. First, the longstanding suburbanization of employment and population in cities with very dense urban cores essentially stopped in the first decade of the 21st century. For cities with less dense cores, however, the decentralization of employment ...
Journal Article
Exploring the Economic Effects of the Opioid Epidemic
Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from opioid overdoses in recent years. What has this epidemic done to the economy? And why is the crisis so much worse right here in the Third District?
Briefing
Commuting Patterns and Characteristics of Fifth District Counties
This article extends our previous work on the categorization of counties in the Fifth District based on their economic connectivity. Using commuting patterns to proxy for connectivity, we group counties into four categories. We next compare our classification with the USDA/ERS RUCC classification system. Finally, we characterize each category using different socioeconomic indicators. We claim that the information conveyed by this study is relevant when designing regionally targeted policies.