How Has Germany’s Economy Been Affected by the Recent Surge in Immigration?

Matthew Higgins and Thomas Klitgaard



Germany emerged as a leading destination for immigration around 2011, as the country’s labor market improved while unemployment climbed elsewhere in the European Union. A second wave began in 2015, with refugees from the Middle East adding to already heavy inflows from Eastern Europe. The demographic consequences of the surge in immigration include a renewed rise in Germany’s population and the stabilization of the country’s median age. The macroeconomic consequences are hard to measure but look promising, since per capita income growth has held up and unemployment has declined. Data on labor-market outcomes specific to immigrants are similarly favorable through 2015, but reveal challenges in how well the economy is adjusting to the second immigration wave.

Just Released: The New York Fed Staff Forecast—April 2019

David Lucca, Jonathan McCarthy, and Richard Peach

Today, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is hosting the spring meeting of its Economic Advisory Panel (EAP). As has become the custom at this meeting, the New York Fed Research staff is presenting its forecast for U.S. growth, inflation, and the unemployment rate. Following the presentation, members of the EAP, which consists of leading economists in academia and the private sector, are asked to critique the staff forecast. Such feedback helps the staff evaluate the assumptions and reasoning underlying its forecast as well as the forecast’s key risks. The feedback is also an important part of the forecasting process because it informs the staff’s discussions with New York Fed President John Williams about economic conditions. In that same spirit, we are sharing a short summary of the staff forecast in this post; for more detail, see the New York Fed Staff Outlook Presentation from the EAP meeting on our website.

The Keynesian Growth Approach to Macroeconomic Policy and Productivity

Gianluca Benigno and Luca Fornaro



Productivity is one of the key determinants of potential output—that is, the trend level of production consistent with stable inflation. A productivity growth slowdown has occurred in several advanced economies in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, raising concerns about long-term growth. In response, a variety of supply-side policy options have been proposed, such as reforms to increase labor and product market flexibility. In this blog post, we consider the role of demand-side policies in raising trend productivity growth.

Expecting the Unexpected: Job Losses and Household Spending

Fatih Karahan, Brendan Moore, and Laura Pilossoph



Unemployment risk constitutes one of the most significant sources of uncertainty facing workers in the United States. A large body of work has carefully documented that job loss may have long-term effects on one’s career, depressing earnings by as much as 20 percent after fifteen to twenty years. Given the severity of a job loss for earnings, an important question is how much such an event affects one’s standard of living during a spell of unemployment. This blog post explores how unemployment and expectations of job loss interact to affect household spending.

The Sensitivity of Long-Term Interest Rates: A Tale of Two Frequencies

David Lucca, Samuel Hanson, and Jonathan Wright



The sensitivity of long-term interest rates to short-term interest rates is a central feature of the yield curve. This post, which draws on our Staff Report, shows that long- and short-term rates co-move to a surprising extent at high frequencies (over daily or monthly periods). However, since 2000, they co-move far less at lower frequencies (over six months or a year). We discuss potential explanations for this finding and its implications for the transmission of monetary policy.

Global Trends in Interest Rates

Marco Del Negro, Domenico Giannone, Marc P. Giannoni, Andrea Tambalotti, Brandyn Bok, and Eric Qian



Long-term government bond yields are at their lowest levels of the past 150 years in advanced economies. In this blog post, we argue that this low-interest-rate environment reflects secular global forces that have lowered real interest rates by about two percentage points over the past forty years. The magnitude of this decline has been nearly the same in all advanced economies, since their real interest rates have converged over this period. The key factors behind this development are an increase in demand for safety and liquidity among investors and a slowdown in global economic growth.

The New York Fed DSGE Model Forecast—January 2019

Michael Cai, Marco Del Negro, Ethan Matlin, and Reca Sarfati

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 October 2018. As usual, we wish to remind our readers that the DSGE model forecast is not an official New York Fed forecast, but only an input to the Research staff’s overall forecasting process. For more information about the model and variables discussed here, see our DSGE model Q & A.

Monitoring Economic Conditions during a Government Shutdown

Patrick Adams, Domenico Giannone, Eric Qian, and Argia Sbordone



The recent partial shutdown of the federal government has disrupted publication schedules for many U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) data releases. Most notably, the release of GDP for the fourth quarter of 2018—originally scheduled for January 30—has been postponed indefinitely. Even without the full slate of Census Bureau and BEA releases, forecasters have continued to make predictions for 2018:Q4 GDP growth; as of February 1, the New York Fed Staff Nowcast stands at 2.6 percent, the Atlanta Fed's GDPNow stands at 2.5 percent, and the Blue Chip Financial Forecasts estimate stands at 2.6 percent. How accurate are these predictions for 2018:Q4 relative to the BEA’s first estimate? Have the missing data jeopardized the accuracy of predictions for 2019:Q1? The New York Fed Staff Nowcast provides a lens through which to answer these questions, thanks to its entirely automated design and its ability to mimic judgmental forecasters’ processing of incoming data. Using real‑time historic data, we can assess the importance of missing releases by simulating similar dataflow disruptions for past quarters.

Just Released: Interactive R-star Charts

Anna Snider

With the arrival of Bank President John Williams from the San Francisco Fed, we’re now running—and sharing the output of—models he helped develop to obtain estimates of the natural rate of interest, or r-star, for the United States and other advanced economies. In the models’ definition, r-star is the real interest rate that allows an economy to expand in line with its underlying potential while keeping inflation stable.

Is the United States Relying on Foreign Investors to Fund Its Larger Budget Deficit?

Thomas Klitgaard and Linda Wang



The federal tax cut and the increase in federal spending at the beginning of 2018 substantially increased the government deficit, requiring a jump in the amount of Treasury securities needed to fund the gap. One question is whether the government will have to rely on foreign investors to buy these securities. Data for the first half of 2018 are available and, so far, the country has not had to increase the pace of borrowing from abroad. The current account balance, which measures how much the United States borrows from the rest of the world, has been essentially unchanged. Instead, the tax cut has boosted private saving, allowing the United States to finance the higher federal government deficit without increasing the amount borrowed from foreign investors.