5 posts from "December 2025"
December 23, 2025
Tariffs, Trade, and Tumbling Credit Scores: The Top 5 LSE Posts of 2025
Each year brings a new set of economic challenges: In 2025, major areas of focus included tariffs and trade tensions, as well as the financial pressures facing younger adults. New York Fed economists contributed insightful research on both topics—and readers took notice. In fact, all five of the year’s most-read posts on Liberty Street Economics analyzed aspects of these issues. Read on to see how the restoration of student loan data to credit reports affected borrowers’ credit scores, whether the costs of a college degree are still worth it, how businesses are responding to higher tariffs, and why the U.S. runs a trade deficit.
December 22, 2025
A New Public Data Source: Call Reports from 1959 to 2025
Call Reports are regulatory filings in which commercial banks report their assets, liabilities, income, and other information. They are one of the most-used data sources in banking and finance. In this post, we describe a new dataset made available on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s website that contains time-consistent balance sheets and income statements for commercial banks in the United States from 1959 to 2025.
December 17, 2025
Letters of Recommendation in the PhD Job Market: Lessons from Specialized Banks
Banks must extract useful signals of a potential borrower’s quality from a large set of possibly informative characteristics when making lending decisions. A model that speaks to how banks specialize in lending to an industry in order to better extract signals from data, can potentially be applied to a number of real-world scenarios. In this post, we apply lessons from such a model to a topic of timely relevance in economics: job market recommendation letters. Institutions looking to hire new economists must evaluate PhD applicants based on limited and often noisy signals of future performance, including letters of recommendation from these applicants’ advisors or co-authors. Using insights from our model, we argue that the value of these letters depends on who reads them.
December 15, 2025
Designing Bank Regulation with Accounting Discretion
Why does the banking industry remain prone to large and costly disruptions despite being so heavily regulated? Is there a need for more regulation, less regulation, or simply different regulation? Our recent Staff Report combines insights from academic research in economics, finance, and accounting to provide a deeper understanding of the challenges involved in designing and implementing bank regulation, as well as opportunities for future exploration. This post focuses on the regulation of bank capital, but the ideas are applicable more broadly.
December 12, 2025
The New York Fed DSGE Model Forecast— December 2025
This post presents an update of the economic forecasts generated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. We describe very briefly our forecast and its change since September 2025. To summarize, growth in 2025 is expected to be stronger than in September due to a lower projected path of the policy rate, as well as higher productivity. Inflation projections are higher in 2025 because of cost-push shocks, which capture the effects of tariffs. The model’s predictions for the short-run real natural rate of interest (or r*) in 2025 have decreased relative to September.
RSS Feed
Follow Liberty Street Economics
