Liberty Street Economics

Look for our next post on March 24, 2023.

March 10, 2023

Is Your Apartment Breaking because Your Landlord Is Broke?

Lee Seltzer

Decorative photo: Water dripping from ceiling into plastic bucket on floor in living room, space for text. Leaking roof

Thirty-one percent of housing units in the United States are rental units, and rental housing is unique because unlike in the case of homeownership, renters rely on the property owner for maintenance spending. From the property owner’s perspective, building maintenance is an important investment necessary to keep the asset in good condition. However, like all investments, it is only possible to maintain a building with sufficient financial resources. In a recent staff report, I examine the relationship between a building’s financing constraints and its maintenance. I find that financially constrained buildings, colloquially “broke,” tend to be less well maintained.

Posted at 7:00 am in Corporate Finance, Housing | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 9, 2023

Inflation Persistence: Dissecting the News in January PCE Data

Martin Almuzara and Argia Sbordone

decorative photo of a sales receipt with the word price at the top

This post presents updated estimates of inflation persistence, following the release of personal consumption expenditure (PCE) price data for January 2023. The estimates are obtained by the Multivariate Core Trend (MCT), a model we introduced on Liberty Street Economics last year and covered most recently here and here. The MCT is a dynamic factor model estimated on monthly data for the seventeen major sectors of the PCE price index. It decomposes each sector’s inflation as the sum of a common trend, a sector-specific trend, a common transitory shock, and a sector-specific transitory shock. The trend in PCE inflation is constructed as the sum of the common and the sector-specific trends weighted by the expenditure shares.

Posted at 7:00 am in Inflation, Macroeconomics | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 6, 2023

Insights from Newly Digitized Banking Data, 1867-1904

Stephan Luck and Sergio Correia

decorative photo: 19th century bank building with roman columns and resources/liabilities data superimposed.

Call reports—regulatory filings in which commercial banks report their assets, liabilities, income, and other information—are one of the most-used data sources in banking and finance. Though call reports were collected as far back as 1867, the underlying data are only easily accessible for the recent past: the mid-1980s onward in the case of the FDIC’s FFIEC call reports. To help researchers look farther back in time, we’ve begun creating a complete digital record of this “missing” call report data; this data release covers 1867 through 1904, the bulk of the National Banking Era. Here, we describe the digitization process and highlight some of the interesting features of that era from a research perspective.

Posted at 7:00 am in Banks, Economic History, Financial Institutions | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 1, 2023

The Dollar’s Imperial Circle

Ozge Akinci, Gianluca Benigno, Serra Pelin, and Jonathan Turek

Decorative: Large dollar sign with circles around it superimposed over an image of a city and world map.

The importance of the U.S. dollar in the context of the international monetary system has been examined and studied extensively. In this post, we argue that the dollar is not only the dominant global currency but also a key variable affecting global economic conditions. We describe the mechanism through which the dollar acts as a procyclical force, generating what we dub the “Dollar’s Imperial Circle,” where swings in the dollar govern global macro developments.

Posted at 7:00 am in Currency, International Economics, Macroeconomics | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 27, 2023

Does the CRA Increase Household Access to Credit?

Erica Bucchieri, Jacob Conway, Jack Glaser, and Matthew Plosser

Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) in 1977 to encourage banks to meet the needs of borrowers in the areas in which they operate. In particular, the Act is focused on credit access to low- and moderate-income communities that had historically been subject to discriminatory practices like redlining.

Posted at 7:00 am in Banks, Credit, Equitable Growth, Inequality, Regulation | Permalink | Comments (2)

February 23, 2023

A Turning Point in Wage Growth?

Martin Almuzara, Richard Audoly, and Davide Melcangi

The surge in wage growth experienced by the U.S. economy over the past two years is showing some tentative signs of moderation. In this post, we take a closer look at the underlying data by estimating a model designed to isolate the persistent component—or trend—of wage growth. Our central finding is that this trend may have peaked in early 2022, having experienced an earlier rise and subsequent moderation that were broad-based across sectors. We also find that wage growth seems to be moderating more slowly than the trend in services inflation.

Posted at 7:00 am in Inflation, Labor Economics, Macroeconomics | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 22, 2023

How Much Can GSCPI Improvements Help Reduce Inflation?

Ozge Akinci, Gianluca Benigno, Hunter L. Clark, William Cross-Bermingham, and Ethan Nourbash

Decorative image: Global map with cargo ship and bar chart

Inflationary pressures—their determinants and evolution—continue to dominate policy discussions. In this post, we provide a simple framework to analyze the determinants of different measures of inflation and use it to lay out a risk-scenario analysis. We find that global supply factors captured by the New York Fed’s Global Supply Chain Pressure Index (GSCPI) are strongly associated with inflationary developments measured by the producer price index (PPI) and by the c0nsumer price index (CPI). Under the assumption that the GSCPI falls back to its historical average over twelve months, our model would project a substantial easing of consumer price inflation over 2023 to below 4.0 percent. The normalization of the GSCPI would then be consistent with a return of inflation to levels consistent with a soft-landing scenario.

Posted at 7:00 am in Inflation, International Economics, Supply Chain | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 21, 2023

How Have Swings in Demand Affected Global Supply Chain Pressures?

Gianluca Benigno, Hunter L. Clark, William Cross-Bermingham, and Ethan Nourbash

decorative: Global logistics network transportation, Map global logistics partnership connection of Container Cargo freight ship for Logistics Import Export background

In a January 2022 post, we first presented the Global Supply Chain Pressure Index (GSCPI), a parsimonious global measure designed to capture supply chain disruptions using a range of indicators. The spirit of our index was to isolate supply factors, such as shutdowns in response to the pandemic, that put pressure on the global supply chain. In this post, we describe an auxiliary index, the Net GSCPI, which differs from the GSCPI by not filtering out demand factors. This “net” index is meant to capture global supply chain stress from both the supply and demand sides. Our analysis documents that the net index is currently below its historical average, unlike the original index, due to both the easing of supply constraints and a contraction in global demand.

Posted at 7:00 am in Inflation, International Economics, Supply Chain | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 16, 2023

Younger Borrowers Are Struggling with Credit Card and Auto Loan Payments

Andrew Haughwout, Donghoon Lee, Daniel Mangrum, Joelle Scally, and Wilbert van der Klaauw

young Woman shopping online with laptop and credit card on hand.

Total debt balances grew by $394 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022, the largest nominal quarterly increase in twenty years, according to the latest Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit from the New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data. Mortgage balances, the largest form of household debt, drove the increase with a gain […]

Posted at 11:00 am in Credit, Household Finance | Permalink | Comments (3)

February 15, 2023

What Is “Outlook-at-Risk?”

Nina Boyarchenko, Richard Crump, Leonardo Elias, and Ignacio Lopez Gaffney

Editor’s note: Since this post was first published, the y-axis label in the last chart has been corrected. February 15, 9:30 a.m.

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has increased the target range for the federal funds rate by 4.50 percentage points since March 16, 2022. In tightening the stance of monetary policy, the FOMC balances the risk of inflation remaining persistently high if the economy continues to run “hot” against the risk of unemployment rising as the economy cools. In this post, we review a quantitative approach to measuring the evolution of risks to real GDP growth, the unemployment rate, and inflation that is inspired by our previous work on “Vulnerable Growth.” We find that, in February, downside risks to real GDP growth and upside risks to unemployment moderated slightly, and upside risks to inflation continued to decline.

Posted at 7:00 am in Financial Markets, Inflation, Macroeconomics, Unemployment | Permalink

Markets & Policy Implementation

Liberty Street Economics

Is Your Apartment Breaking because Your Landlord Is Broke?

Inflation Persistence: Dissecting the News in January PCE Data

Insights from Newly Digitized Banking Data, 1867-1904

The Dollar’s Imperial Circle

Does the CRA Increase Household Access to Credit?

A Turning Point in Wage Growth?

How Much Can GSCPI Improvements Help Reduce Inflation?

How Have Swings in Demand Affected Global Supply Chain Pressures?

Younger Borrowers Are Struggling with Credit Card and Auto Loan Payments

What Is “Outlook-at-Risk?”

Economic Inequality

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