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Report
Does Job Quality Affect Occupational Mobility?
Job quality, a well-known topic in workforce development circles, is an underutilized but useful lens with which to examine labor market conditions. Given the record number of resignations and available job openings, especially in the lower-paid industry sectors, along with popular labor market narratives around the Great R’s (Resignation, Renegotiation, Reshuffle), I wonder to what extent job quality plays a role in the occupational mobility of workers. Occupational mobility includes all potential outcomes an individual has when holding a job. In addition to the option of changing to ...
Report
Rural Employment in Four States: A Story of Specialization and Change (2010 through 2019)
The media are full of stories about rural areas suffering from economic stagnation or withering away from depopulation, but do these stories represent all of rural America (Swenson, 2019)? The short answer is no. While some rural places have experienced long-term employment loss, others have experienced employment growth. Whether facing employment gains or losses, a region’s success depends on its resilience or ability to prepare for, adapt to, and thrive in changing economic environments. This report looks at employment trends in the nonmetropolitan counties in the Fourth District and ...
Report
Home Mortgage Lending by Race and Income in a Time of Low Interest Rates: Examples from Select Counties in Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania from 2018 through 2021
Signed into law in 1975 by President Ford, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) requires most financial institutions to disclose information on their mortgage lending. Annually, this information creates a publicly accessible data set that includes millions of records and covers about 90 percent of mortgage lending in the United States (Gerardi, Willen, and Zhang, 2020). More information on HMDA can be found in this summary: What is HMDA and why is it important?Several years ago, the Cleveland Fed examined data for seven large urban counties in the Fourth District.1 At that time, we looked ...
Report
The Decline in Access to Jobs and the Location of Employment Growth in US Metro Areas: Implications for Economic Opportunity and Mobility
Job access, defined as the number or share of jobs found within a fixed distance or travel time from a worker’s residence, is an important indicator of economic opportunity and mobility. Access to jobs has been associated with positive individual economic outcomes for low-income minority workers.1 By contrast, low rates of job access have been linked to longer unemployment spells and lower rates of generational economic mobility.2Increasing job accessibility has been found to significantly decrease the duration of joblessness among lower-income displaced workers, especially for African ...
Report
Clicking for Credit: Experiences of Online Lender Applicants from the Small Business Credit Survey
This report presents findings on the experiences of small businesses seeking credit from online lenders, based on data from the 2021 Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS). According to findings, firms that apply to online lenders are more likely to be newer and have fewer employees, lower revenues, and weaker credit scores. In addition, Black- and Hispanic-owned firms are more likely than white- and Asian-owned firms to report that they applied to an online lender. Furthermore, contrary to prior SBCS findings, online-lender applicants were less likely than bank applicants to be approved for the ...
Report
Has Bank Consolidation Changed People’s Access to a Full-Service Bank Branch?
The consolidation that took place in the banking industry during the 2000s and 2010s led to an increase in the total number of bank branches per institution and resulted in a larger number of branches to meet customers’ banking needs.
Report
Missed Connections in Cleveland: The Disconnect Between Job Access and Employment
The job access rate refers to the share of jobs in a region that can be reached within a typical commute distance or time. Job access rates in Northeast Ohio have declined continuously since 2000, as employment opportunities and the population have spread farther out (Kneebone and Holmes, 2015; Pacetti, Murray, and Hartman, 2016; Fee, 2020). Declining access to jobs has made it increasingly difficult for workers to reach their workplaces via public transportation, disproportionately impacting Black and economically distressed residents (Barkley and Pereira, 2015; Brown and McShepard, 2016).
Report
Measuring Evictions during the COVID-19 Crisis
Evictions are a serious risk for households facing job loss and economic upheaval during the COVID-19 pandemic, and temporary policies put in place to protect renters are beginning to expire. To understand how the crisis is affecting evictions, we measured eviction filing activity across 44 cities and counties. As of July 7, 2020, eviction filings have almost returned to their prepandemic levels in places where local bans have expired or where they were never enacted. We find that eviction filings tend to surge after temporary policies expire much more in places that enacted both filing bans ...
Report
An Uphill Battle: COVID-19’s Outsized Toll on Minority-Owned Firms
Since COVID-19 sparked state-mandated lockdowns nationwide in March, data suggest that minority-owned small businesses have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, facing higher rates of closures and sharper declines in cash balances as compared to nonminority-owned small businesses. Research shows that Black-owned businesses closed at more than twice the rate of white-owned firms and experienced declines in cash balances nine times as steep as nonminority firms in some cases. Black-owned businesses faced the greatest impact of any racial group, though Latinx- and Asian-owned ...
Report
Inflation Remains a Burden and Consumer Debt is on the Rise
The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s Community Issues Survey (CIS) collects information semiannually from direct service providers to monitor economic conditions and identify issues impacting low- and moderate-income (LMI) households in the Fourth District—a region that includes Ohio, western Pennsylvania, eastern Kentucky, and the northern panhandle of West Virginia. In March 2023, we surveyed more than 600 service providers who directly serve LMI individuals and communities across our District and received 95 responses (15 percent response rate). The results of this survey, ...