Search Results
Journal Article
Emerging Bond Markets and COVID-19: Evidence from Mexico
The pandemic caused by the coronavirus is depressing economic activity and severely straining government budgets globally. Without international support, the ability of emerging economies to weather this crisis will depend crucially on access to and the cost of borrowing in domestic government bond markets. Analyzing bond flows and risk premiums for Mexican government bonds during the pandemic gives some insights into a major emerging economy’s experience. Mexican risk premiums have increased more than 1 percentage point above predicted levels, pointing to tighter funding conditions for the ...
Journal Article
Child Care, COVID-19, and our Economic Future
Child care is important for cultivating the future workforce, and it also ensures that working parents of today can participate in the economy, helping to achieve the Federal Reserve’s mandate for full employment. While child care in the U.S. is a piece of critical infrastructure, it is often invisible and undervalued. Straddling the lines between parenting, education, and small business, child care does not get the full attention and resources of any particular domain, and its contribution to the economy has been overlooked.Longstanding and widespread constraints in the child care sector ...
Speech
3D Public Servants: The Courage to Be Human
Online, prerecorded video presentation at South by Southwest (SXSW), by Mary C. Daly, President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, April 16, 2020.
Briefing
The Pandemic, Child Care and Women’s Labor Force Participation
The pandemic has changed how households work, spend and care for children. In this Economic Brief, we highlight economic research that examines the patterns seen in women's work experiences in particular. We look at both the pandemic and, more generally, how shocks to the economy affect women's work decisions. Throughout, we will try to connect what we observe to households' broader economic environments and will emphasize — in the case of the pandemic — the role of away-from-home child care.
Journal Article
Assessing Recent Stock Market Valuation with Macro Data
History suggests that elevated values of the cyclically adjusted price-earnings (CAPE) ratio may indicate an overvalued stock market. A valuation model that uses a small set of economic variables can help account for movements in the CAPE ratio over the past six decades. One of these variables is a macroeconomic uncertainty index. Comparing the model’s prediction for the second and third quarters of 2020 to the 2008–2009 period suggests that investors have reacted to macroeconomic uncertainty very differently during the COVID-19 outbreak than they did during the financial crisis.
Journal Article
COVID-19 Impacts on Housing Stability in the Twelfth Federal Reserve District
In the face of layoffs and furloughs due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many renters and homeowners across the country have struggled to make their mortgage or rent payments. Banks have provided flexibility to borrowers through loan deferrals and forbearance during the pandemic. The federal CARES Act provided stimulus payments to low- and moderate-income people and expanded unemployment insurance payments by states, allowing many to continue paying their bills during the early months of the pandemic. The CARES Act also included rental assistance to be disbursed by states, a moratorium on evictions ...
Journal Article
Sudden Stops and COVID-19: Lessons from Mexico’s History
The COVID-19 pandemic produced a sharp contraction in capital flows in emerging markets during the spring of 2020. Such contractions are known as “sudden stops” and historically have been associated with significant downturns in a country’s economic activity. Evidence from Mexico’s financial crisis history suggests that sudden stops tend to exhibit a common pattern: the crisis lasts one to two years before a rapid but partial recovery, followed by years of protracted stagnation.
Working Paper
The Covid-19 Pandemic Spurred Growth in Automation: What Does this Mean for Minority Workers?
The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated trends in automation as many employers seek to save on labor costs amid widespread illness, increased worker leverage, and market pressures to onshore supply chains. While existing research has explored how automation may displace non-specialized jobs, there is typically less attention paid to how this displacement may interact with preexisting structural issues around racial inequality. This analysis updates that of a 2021 Brookings paper by the authors, finding that Black and Hispanic workers continue to be overrepresented in the 30 occupations with the ...
Working Paper
A Simple Framework to Monitor Inflation
This paper proposes a simple framework to help monitor and understand movements in PCE inflation in real time. The approach is to decompose inflation using simple categorical-level regressions or systems of equations. The estimates are then used to group categories into components of PCE inflation. I review some applications of the methodology, and show how it can help explain inflation dynamics over recent episodes. The methodology shows that inflation remained low in the mid-2010s primarily because of factors unrelated to aggregate economic conditions. I also apply the methodology to ...
Working Paper
The Chicago Fed DSGE Model: Version 2
The Chicago Fed dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model is used for policy analysis and forecasting at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. This guide describes its specification, estimation, dynamic characteristics, and how it is used to forecast the U.S. economy. In many respects the model resembles other medium-scale New Keynesian frameworks, but there are several features which distinguish it: the monetary policy rule includes anticipated future deviations, productivity is driven by both neutral and investment specific technical change, multiple price and wage indices identify ...