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Economic Research

Liberty Street Economics
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The Unintended Effects of Interest Rate Caps: Credit Reallocation to Safer Borrowers
The authors continue their study of how interest rate caps have played out in three U.S. states, addressing how lenders reallocate the credit they used to provide before caps were imposed. They find that those that lend exclusively to high-risk borrowers at rates above the cap may decide to stop lending to high-risk borrowers in that state. Others, however, may try to change their “credit box” by lending more to somewhat safer borrowers.
By Rajashri Chakrabarti, Gabriel Leonard, Donald Morgan, Thu Pham, and Lee Seltzer
The Regional Side of the Story: K-Shaped Pattern in Region, Wider Gap in Gas Spending
The authors use the inaugural release of regional consumer spending economic heterogeneity indicators (EHIs) to ask whether these patterns hold for a significant portion of the Second District, and how spending patterns by income in the region have been similar to or different from national patterns. They find similar K-shaped patterns in both retail and gas spending in the region as in the nation.
By Rajashri Chakrabarti, Thu Pham, Beck Pierce, and Maxim Pinkovskiy
Food Insecurity and Consumer Pessimism
While many U.S. households are doing fine and economic activity overall has been expanding, large segments of the population are facing high levels of economic insecurity and financial strain, and consumer sentiment on the whole has dropped to low levels. The authors use newly collected data from the Survey of Consumer Expectations to update their 2020 analysis of disproportionate financial hardship experienced during the early pandemic and to investigate recent changes in food insecurity and broader economic strains.
By Gizem Koşar, Ishva Mehta, and Wilbert van der Klaauw
Assessing the Current State of Wage Inflation
Economists often look at nominal wage growth to gauge labor market imbalances, price pressures, and households’ spending ability. But to do this, it is important to look through short-run fluctuations and retrieve underlying wage inflation. The authors use their own measure of wage growth persistence—called Trend Wage Inflation—to summarize what they learned from wage growth behavior in the past years and draw conclusions for what may lie ahead.
By Martin Almuzara, Richard Audoly, and Davide Melcangi
Detailed Close-up of an AI Chip on a Circuit Board
AI's Macroeconomic Challenges and Promises
In the third quarter of 2025, America's largest tech firms for the first time spent more on capital investment than they earned from operations. The implication is that AI, a technology with the potential to make the economy more productive, is, for now, absorbing resources faster than it is generating returns. The author discusses how the tension between AI's long-run promise and its short-run costs affects the outlooks for inflation, real activity, and financial stability.
By Simone Lenzu
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The Global Credit Cycle in Corporate Bond Returns
The global corporate nonfinancial bond market is both a large investment asset class and a vital source of funding for nonfinancial firms. Yet, in 37 percent of months between 1998 and 2024, more than 80 percent of bonds in the ICE Global Bond Indices moved in the same direction, suggesting a large degree of synchronization. The authors introduce the global credit factor, which creates a global credit cycle in bond risk premia and generates predictable co-movement in bond prices.
By Nina Boyarchenko and Leonardo Elias
RESEARCH TOPICS
Applied Macroeconomics
and Econometrics Center
The mission of the Applied Macroeconomics and Econometrics Center (AMEC) is to provide intellectual leadership in the central banking community in the fields of macro and applied econometrics.

Data Releases
Global Supply Chain Pressure Index
(Updated: Monthly)

Labor Market Tightness Index
(Updated: Monthly)

Measuring the Natural Rate of Interest
(Updated: Quarterly)

Multivariate Core Trend Inflation
(Updated: Monthly)

The New York Fed DSGE Model
(Updated: Quarterly)

New York Fed Staff Nowcast
(Updated: Weekly)

Outlook-at-Risk
(Updated: Monthly)

Treasury Term Premia
(Updated: Daily)

Yield Curve as a Leading Indicator
(Updated: Monthly)
Center for Microeconomic Data
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Labor Market Tightness Index
The HPW Labor Market Tightness Index is an indicator of labor market tightness for summarizing current wage pressures and predicting wage inflation.
Photo: a four-panel picture of people cleaning up after natural disasters
Losses from Natural Disasters
Losses from Natural Disasters provides county-level estimates of the economic and human impact of extreme weather events in the United States.
Reserve Demand Elasticity (RDE)
RDE estimates provide a quantitative measure of the ampleness of reserves in the U.S. banking system in real time. New data are published monthly.
Economic Heterogeneity Indicators (EHIs)
The EHIs are broad-based economic indicators that measure macroeconomic outcomes experienced by different demographic, economic, and geographic groups on both a regional and national level.
Corporate Bond Market Distress Index (CMDI)
The CMDI is a summary metric of corporate bond market functioning based on information from multiple sources including measures of primary market issuance and pricing, secondary market pricing and liquidity conditions, and the relative pricing between traded and nontraded bonds. It updates monthly.
Regional Surveys
Monthly surveys conducted by the New York Fed track the sentiment of executives at regional manufacturing and service-sector firms regarding business conditions.

Data Releases
Empire State Manufacturing Survey
(Updated: Monthly)

Business Leaders Survey
(Updated: Monthly)

Regional Business Surveys:
Special Topics
(Updated: Quarterly)
Regional Employment Trends
These interactive charts track employment in state and metro regions in the Federal Reserve’s Second District, utilizing the New York Fed’s early benchmarks of payroll employment data. It updates monthly.
Mapping Home Price Changes
Explore year-over-year changes in home prices since 2003, both regionally and nationally, using this dynamic map — updated with new home price index data on a monthly basis. Hover over a county for granular data.
Early Benchmarked Employment Data
Monthly releases of early benchmarked employment figures for New York State, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, as well as the metropolitan areas in New York and Northern New Jersey
The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates
Labor market conditions continued to be challenging for recent college graduates at the start of 2026. The unemployment rate remained elevated at about 5.7 percent in the first quarter of 2026, though the underemployment rate edged down to 41.5 percent.
Recent Publications
Regulatory Arbitrage Within the Firm
Regulation shapes the boundaries of firms. When prudential standards bind asymmetrically across subsidiaries of an integrated organization, internal capital markets become a mechanism for regulatory arbitrage. The authors study this in U.S. banking, where holding companies encompass both heavily regulated depository institutions and lightly regulated nonbank affiliates. They find that organizational structure is a fundamental determinant of regulatory outcomes.
Nicola Cetorelli and Shohini Kundu, Staff Report 1196, May 2026
Micro and Macro Cost-Price Dynamics in Normal Times and During Inflation Surges
Firms adjust output prices infrequently despite continuously evolving economic conditions, leading their prices to drift from those that maximize flow profits. The authors study cost-price dynamics in a cross-section of firms in order to jointly explain the time series of aggregate inflation and the frequency of price changes, both during normal times and inflation surges. Their analysis provides novel evidence and insights about the passthrough of costs into prices in both the cross-section of firms and aggregate time-series.
Luca Gagliardone, Mark Gertler, Simone Lenzu, and Joris Tielens, Staff Report 1195, May 2026
Bayesian Persuasion and Cryptography
Bayesian Persuasion assumes that a sender can commit ex ante to an information structure and then release the realized signal ex post. This paper asks when that commitment technology can itself be implemented. The author defines “Receiver-Private Certified Bayesian Persuasion” and shows that this benchmark is equivalent in cryptographic power to secure two-party computation, demonstrating that hiding the signal from the sender is necessary.
Pablo D. Azar, Staff Report 1194, May 2026
Financial Shocks, Productivity, and Prices
Financial crises are frequently followed by persistent slowdowns in aggregate productivity growth. The authors study the interconnection between the productivity and pricing effects of financial shocks. They show that a tightening of credit conditions has a persistent, yet delayed, negative effect on firms’ long-run physical productivity growth while also inducing firms to change their pricing policies. Also, they demonstrate that the pricing adjustments themselves have productivity implications.
Simone Lenzu, David A. Rivers, Joris Tielens, and Shi Hu, Staff Report 1193, April 2026
Artificial Intelligence and Monetary Policy: A Framework and Perspective on Cyclical Transmission, Structural Transition, and Financial Stability
The author develops a framework analyzing how artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes monetary policy through three interrelated channels: cyclical transmission, structural transition, and financial stability. Given that central bank mandates center on price stability and financial stability, these developments place AI squarely within the domain of central banking. The author argues that AI does not call for a redefinition of central banks’ objectives, but it does require a recalibration of existing frameworks.
Simone Lenzu, Staff Report 1192, April 2026
Estimating Demand Shocks from Foot Traffic: A Big-Data Approach
Demand shocks in the service, retail trade, and health sectors are challenging to measure because output only occurs when a customer arrives at an establishment. The authors leverage high-frequency foot-traffic data to estimate demand shocks across New York City’s retail, service, and health sectors. Their analysis shows that demand dynamics in these customer-facing industries are fundamentally heterogeneous: establishments differ systematically in the persistence, volatility, and growth patterns of their demand processes.
Marina Azzimonti, David Wiczer, and Yang Xuan, Staff Report 1191, April 2026
Structural Changes in Investment and the Waning Power of Monetary Policy
Growing evidence suggests that monetary policy shocks have smaller effects on economic activity now than in the past, even putting aside issues of an effective lower bound on interest rates. The authors propose a partial explanation: secular change in both the production and composition of investment goods has weakened private investment’s role in the transmission of monetary policy to labor earnings and consumption. They demonstrate how these results may have important implications for optimal monetary policy.
Justin Bloesch and Jacob P. Weber, Staff Report 1190, March 2026
Repo and the Liquidity Risk Premium
Intermediating funds in the U.S. short-term money markets involves risk, which can be mitigated by holding buffers of liquid securities. The cost of holding these buffers, the liquidity risk premium, is driven by the opportunity cost of holding money and therefore is influenced by monetary policy. The authors use detailed data on the pricing of repurchase agreements (repo) to measure how changes in monetary policy affect the liquidity risk premium embedded in repo pricing.
Adam Copeland and Owen Engbretson, Staff Report 1189, March 2026


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