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45 posts on "Recession"
April 8, 2020

How Does Supervision Affect Bank Performance during Downturns?

New research finds that there is a cyclical nature to the benefits of bank supervisory attention: in normal times, the benefits are smaller, but during downturns the more closely supervised banks exhibit better loan performance and lower earnings volatility.

March 27, 2020

Fight the Pandemic, Save the Economy: Lessons from the 1918 Flu

The COVID-19 outbreak has sparked urgent questions about the impact of pandemics, and the associated countermeasures, on the real economy. Policymakers are in uncharted territory, with little guidance on what the expected economic fallout will be and how the crisis should be managed. In this blog post, we use insights from a recent research paper to discuss two sets of questions. First, what are the real economic effects of a pandemic—and are these effects temporary or persistent? Second, how does the local public health response affect the economic severity of the pandemic? In particular, do non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as social distancing have economic costs, or do policies that slow the spread of the pandemic also reduce its economic severity?

February 26, 2020

Did Subprime Borrowers Drive the Housing Boom?

The role of subprime mortgage lending in the U.S. housing boom of the 2000s is hotly debated in academic literature. One prevailing narrative ascribes the unprecedented home price growth during the mid-2000s to an expansion in mortgage lending to subprime borrowers. This post, based on our recent working paper, “Villains or Scapegoats? The Role of Subprime Borrowers in Driving the U.S. Housing Boom,” presents evidence that is inconsistent with conventional wisdom. In particular, we show that the housing boom and the subprime boom occurred in different places.

February 24, 2020

Understanding Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian Models: Insights from a PRANK

To shed light on the macroeconomic consequences of heterogeneity, Acharya and Dogra develop a stylized HANK model that contains key features present in more complicated HANK models.

February 12, 2020

Reading the Tea Leaves of the U.S. Business Cycle—Part Two

New work by Richard Crump, Domenico Giannone, and David Lucca finds labor market data to be the most reliable information for dating the U.S. business cycle.

February 10, 2020

Reading the Tea Leaves of the U.S. Business Cycle—Part One

Richard Crump, Domenico Giannone, and David Lucca discuss different conceptual approaches to dating the business cycle and study their past performance for the U.S. economy.

July 12, 2019

Just Released: Historical Reconstruction of the New York Fed Staff Nowcast, 2002‑15

The New York Fed Staff Nowcast has been running for over three years. Each Friday at 11:15 a.m., we publish our updated predictions for real GDP growth based on the data released each week. When the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) releases the first estimate of GDP growth, we stop updating our nowcast and archive it. We maintain these archives as part of our Nowcasting Report on the New York Fed’s public website to allow users to study the features of the nowcast and its accuracy. Now, to better understand the model and its performance during different cyclical episodes, we are publishing extended historical archives of the nowcast. Doing so provides fourteen additional years of forecasts that can be used not only to evaluate our nowcast model, but also to explore daily U.S. economic history through the model’s lens.

Posted at 11:27 am in Forecasting, Recession | Permalink
July 10, 2019

Did the Value of a College Degree Decline during the Great Recession?

In an earlier post, we studied how educational attainment affects labor market outcomes and earnings inequality. In this post, we investigate whether these labor market effects were preserved across the last business cycle: Did students with certain types of educational attainment weather the recession better?

February 13, 2018

Just Released: Great Recession’s Impact Lingers in Hardest‑Hit Regions

The New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data today released our Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit for the fourth quarter of 2017. Along with this report, we have posted an update of state-level data on balances and delinquencies for 2017. Overall aggregate debt balances increased again, with growth in all types of balances except for home equity lines of credit. In our post on the first quarter of 2017 we reported that overall balances had surpassed their peak set in the third quarter of 2008—the result of a slow but steady climb from several years of sharp deleveraging during the Great Recession.

January 16, 2018

What about Spending on Consumer Goods?

In a recent Liberty Street Economics post, I showed that one major category of consumer spending—spending on discretionary services such as recreation, transportation, and household utilities—behaved very differently in the 2007-09 recession and subsequent recovery than in previous business cycles: specifically, it fell more steeply and has recovered much more slowly.

Posted at 7:00 am in Macroeconomics, Recession | Permalink
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Liberty Street Economics features insight and analysis from New York Fed economists working at the intersection of research and policy. Launched in 2011, the blog takes its name from the Bank’s headquarters at 33 Liberty Street in Manhattan’s Financial District.

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