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3 posts on "EHIs"
June 2, 2026

Struggling Regional Small Businesses Deeply Pessimistic About 2026 Prospects

Will Aarons and Asani Sarkar

Small Business owner calculating at the counter of his cafe.

We recently updated the suite of indicators describing the performance of small businesses in the Second District (defined, for the purpose of this study, as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut) and nationally with data from the 2025 edition of the Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS). In this post, we find that regional small businesses reported severe declines in employment and revenue growth in 2025 and became more pessimistic about growth in 2026. In contrast, small firms in the rest of the nation enjoyed stable revenues and employment in 2025 and, while they also had lower expectations of future growth, the decline was smaller in magnitude. Given the importance of small businesses in employment generation, analyzing such data helps to inform the design of effective monetary policy and to understand trends in the regional economy.

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Posted at 7:00 am in Credit, Macroeconomics, New Jersey, New York, Regional Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 3, 2026

New York Fed EHIs Reveal Small Business Struggles

Will Aarons and Asani Sarkar

Two Senior owner business shopkeeper wearing aprons checking inventory and packing new orders online for customer eco friendly brown paper wrapped with environmental Sustainability friendly before shipping to customers ,zero waster and plastic free quality control

The New York Fed’s Economic Heterogeneity Indicators (EHIs) aim to study macroeconomic outcomes experienced by various groups of people and businesses. We recently added a suite of indicators describing the performance of small businesses to the EHIs—both for the region (defined, for the purpose of this study, as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut) and nationally. Small businesses are critical to employment generation as they accounted for almost 63 percent of new private sector jobs since 2005 and employed almost 46 percent of all U.S. workers in 2025. Thus, understanding economic trends and impacts for small businesses is important for designing effective monetary policy and aligns with the New York Fed’s mission to support the regional economy. In this post, we highlight some aspects of small business profitability, revenues, employment, and indebtedness since 2019 for firms of different sizes.  

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Posted at 10:01 am in Employment, New Jersey, New York, Regional Analysis | Permalink

A New Dataset for Consumer Spending in the New York Fed EHIs

Rajashri Chakrabarti, Thu Pham, Beck Pierce, and Maxim L. Pinkovskiy

Mother and children unloading groceries

We are enhancing our set of Economic Heterogeneity Indicators (EHIs) by adding a set of metrics on consumer spending with data presented by income, education, race and ethnicity, age, and urban status. The data will help track the evolution of aggregate behavior by analyzing the spending of specific groups in a more timely manner than is possible using public surveys.

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Posted at 10:00 am in Demographics, Equitable Growth, Household Finance | Permalink

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