Gizem Kosar and Kyle Smith



The rate of employer-to-employer transitions and the average wage of full-time offers rose compared with a year ago, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s July 2018 SCE Labor Market Survey. Workers’ satisfaction with their promotion opportunities improved since July 2017, while their satisfaction with wage compensation retreated slightly. Regarding expectations, the average expected wage offer (conditional on receiving one) and the reservation wage—the lowest wage at which respondents would be willing to accept a new job—both increased. The expected likelihood of moving into unemployment over the next four months showed a small uptick, which was most pronounced for female respondents.

Rajashri Chakrabarti and Michelle Jiang



Amid dialogue about the soaring student loan burden, questions arise about how educational characteristics (school type, selectivity, and major) affect disparities in post-college labor market outcomes. In this post, we specifically explore the impact of such school and major choices on employment, earnings, and upward economic mobility. Insight into determinants of economic disparity is key for understanding long-term consumption and inequality patterns. In addition, this gives us a window into factors that could be used to ameliorate income inequality and promote economic mobility.

Nicole Gorton and Maxim L. Pinkovskiy



The state of the New York City subway system has worsened considerably over the past few years. As a consequence of rising ridership and decaying infrastructure, the network is plagued by delays and frequently fails to deliver New Yorkers to their destinations on time. While these delays are a headache for anyone who depends on the subway to get around, they do not affect all riders in the same way. In this post, we explain why subway delays disproportionately affect low-income New Yorkers. We show that wealthier commuters who rely on the subway are less likely to experience extensive issues on their commutes.

Mary Amiti, Sebastian Heise, and Noah Kwicklis



President Trump announced a new tariff of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum imports on March 8, 2018. One objective of these tariffs is to protect jobs in the U.S. steel industry. They were introduced under a rarely used 1962 Act, which allows the government to impose trade barriers for national security reasons. Although the tariffs were initially to apply to all trading partners, Canada and Mexico are currently exempt subject to NAFTA negotiations, and implementation of the tariffs for the European Union, Argentina, Australia, and Brazil has been paused. South Korea has received a permanent exemption from the steel tariffs and will instead be subject to a quota of 70 percent of its current average steel exports to the United States. In this post, we consider how the steel tariffs could affect U.S. trade and employment. We focus on steel since the steel industry employs about three times as many workers as the aluminum industry, although qualitatively our conclusions apply to both. We argue that the new tariffs are likely to lead to a net loss in U.S. employment, at least in the short to medium run.

Jaison R. Abel and Richard Deitz



All in all, the upstate New York economy fared pretty well during the last business cycle. Job losses were less severe in upstate New York during the Great Recession than they were for the nation as a whole, which was quite unusual. And once the jobs recovery began in 2010, employment in upstate New York started to grow again, though at a pace well below the nation’s. The result of this slow but steady recovery was that by mid-2015, upstate New York had gained back all of the jobs that were lost during the Great Recession—a milestone the region had failed to reach at all during the prior few business cycles. Troublingly, though, job growth in the region stalled shortly after crossing this milestone. Indeed, only a handful of jobs have been added to the area’s total employment count since early 2016. In this blog post, we explore the nature and magnitude of this slowdown in upstate New York.

Jason Bram and Nicole Gorton



It’s been said that if you want to know how the economy is doing, look at how many people are carrying shopping bags. That adage may not hold so well today. The rise of the internet and e-commerce over the past two decades has chipped away at the market share of “brick and mortar” retailers. But it’s only been in the past few years that this shift in market share has had a noteworthy effect on retail employment. In this post, we focus on national and local employment trends in two categories of retail—department stores and nonstore retailers—and try to assess how the surge in online shopping has affected local labor markets across the United States.

John J. Conlon, Gizem Kosar, Giorgio Topa, and Basit Zafar



The New York Fed for the first time released its Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) Labor Market Survey which focuses on individuals’ experiences and expectations in the labor market. These data have been collected every four months since March 2014 as part of the SCE. It is being introduced now because the module has enough historical data to reveal notable trends. In this post we introduce the SCE Labor Market Survey and highlight some of its features.

Nora Fitzpatrick, Laura Pilossoph, Anika Pratt, and Aysegul Sahin



The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently hosted “The Evolution of Work,” a conference that brought together thought leaders from academia, government, industry, labor, and the nonprofit sector to explore how the nature of work is evolving, including the expanding role of technology, shifts in employee work arrangements and employer-employee relationships, and the effects of these changes on workforce and community development strategies. The gathering was cosponsored by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Freelancers Union.

Sushant Acharya, Julien Bengui, Keshav Dogra, and Shu Lin Wee



Economic activity has remained subdued following the Great Recession. One interpretation of the listless recovery is that recessions inflict permanent damage on an economy’s productive capacity. For example, extended periods of high unemployment can lead to skill losses among workers, reducing human capital and lowering future output. This notion that temporary recessions have long-lasting consequences is often termed hysteresis. Another explanation for sluggish growth is the influential secular stagnation hypothesis, which attributes slow growth to long-term changes in the economy’s underlying structure. While these explanations are observationally similar, they have very different policy implications. In particular, if structural factors are responsible for slow growth, then there might be little monetary policy can do to reverse this trend. If instead hysteresis is to blame, then monetary policy may be able to reverse slowdowns in potential output, or even prevent them from occurring in the first place.

Bianca De Paoli, Thomas Klitgaard, and Harry Wheeler



Japan offers a preview of future U.S. demographic trends, having already seen a large increase in the population over 65. So, how has the Japanese economy dealt with this change? A look at the data shows that women of all ages have been pulled into the labor force and that more people are working longer. This transformation of the work force has not been enough to prevent a very tight labor market in a slowly growing economy, and it may help explain why inflation remains minimal. Namely, wages are not responding as much as they might to the tight labor market because women and older workers tend to have lower bargaining power than prime-age males.