Tweets by @NYFedResearch

Economic Research

How Are They Now? A Checkup on Homeowners Who Experienced Foreclosure
The Great Recession, with its dramatic housing bust, led to a wave of home foreclosures as overleveraged borrowers found themselves unable to meet their payment obligations. Using anonymized credit report data from the New York Fed’s Consumer Credit Panel (CCP), the authors examine the longer-term impact of foreclosures on borrowers’ credit scores and borrowing experiences: have they returned to borrowing or shied away from credit use and homeownership?
By Andrew Haughwout, Donghoon Lee, Daniel Mangrum, Belicia Rodriguez, Joelle Scally, and Wilbert van der Klaauw
Many Places Still Have Not Recovered from the Pandemic Recession
The onset of the pandemic resulted in one of the sharpest and deepest economic downturns in U.S. history. While the nation as a whole has recovered the jobs that were lost during the pandemic recession, many places have not; job shortfalls remain in more than a quarter of the country’s metro areas. The authors examine the uneven geographic recovery from the pandemic recession, noting that much of the New York-Northern New Jersey region is still way behind.
By Jaison R. Abel, Richard Deitz, Jonathan Hastings, and Joelle Scally
Mortgage Rate Lock-In and Homeowners’ Moving Plans
After falling to record lows during the pandemic, the average U.S. 30-year mortgage rate rapidly increased in 2022 and 2023 and now hovers near a two-decade high of 7.2 percent. For those that locked in a low mortgage rate prior to 2022, this significantly increased the cost of moving, potentially reducing geographic mobility and turnover in the housing market. The authors utilize SCE Housing Surveys to estimate the extent to which mortgage rate lock-ins are suppressing homeowners’ moving plans.
By Felix Aidala, Andrew Haughwout, Ben Hyman, Jason Somerville, and Wilbert van der Klaauw
Has Market Concentration in U.S. Manufacturing Increased?
The increasing dominance of large firms in the United States has raised concerns about pricing power in the product market, the worry being that large firms could increase markups over marginal costs without fear of losing market share. The authors show that although sales of domestic firms have become more concentrated, import competition has lowered U.S. producers’ share of the market and greatly altered the makeup of the U.S. manufacturing sector.
By Mary Amiti and Sebastian Heise
The New York Fed Consumer Credit Panel: A Foundational CMD Data Set
As the Great Financial Crisis unfolded in 2009, household liabilities, particularly mortgages, became the center of the sharpest recession in decades. Researchers at the New York Fed, the Board of Governors, and the Philadelphia Fed created the New York Fed Consumer Credit Panel (CCP), a new data set drawn from credit bureau data to provide fresh insights into this part of the economy. The authors review how CCP data have provided many valuable insights into household behavior and its implications for the macro economy and financial stability.
By Andrew Haughwout, Donghoon Lee, Daniel Mangrum, Joelle Scally, and Wilbert van der Klaauw
The Survey of Consumer Expectations: A Look Back at the Past Decade
It has been a little over ten years since the Federal Reserve Bank of New York began releasing its Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE). Over the past decade, SCE data have yielded insights on a host of topics and have been cited in more than 170 academic research papers. The authors review some of the headline findings from the survey’s history, highlighting the evolution of consumers’ expectations about inflation and labor market outcomes.
By Olivier Armantier, Gizem Koşar, Giorgio Topa, and Wilbert van der Klaauw
RESEARCH EVENT
RESEARCH TOPICS
Can Discount Window Stigma Be Cured? An Experimental Investigation
The Federal Reserve has been operating as a lender of last resort through its “Discount Window” (DW) for more than a century. Because it aims to address liquidity problems before they have systemic consequences, the DW is the Fed’s first line of defense against financial crises. However, the DW has been plagued by stigma, based on concerns that it could be interpreted as a sign of financial weakness. The authors study how such stigma can be cured.
Olivier Armantier and Charles Holt, Staff Report 1103, May 2024
Information and Market Power in DeFi Intermediation
The decentralized nature of blockchain markets has given rise to a complex and highly heterogeneous market structure. The authors introduce the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) intermediation chain and provide theoretical and empirical evidence that private information is the key determinant of intermediation rents. They propose a repeated bargaining model that predicts that the block builder’s share of the surplus is proportional to the value of their private information.
Pablo Azar, Adrian Casillas, and Maryam Farboodi, Staff Report 1102, May 2024
Do Mortgage Lenders Respond to Flood Risk?
Using property-level mortgage data, property-level risk data, and country-wide FEMA flood maps, the authors identify the effects of flood risk on mortgage lending. Focusing on properties that face flood risk but are not in a FEMA flood zone, they find that lenders are less willing to originate mortgages and charge higher rates for lower LTV loans for properties that face “un-mapped” flood risk. Their results suggest that lenders are aware of flood risk outside FEMA’s identified flood zones.
Kristian S. Blickle, Evan Perry, and João A. C. Santos, Staff Report 1101, May 2024
The Nonlinear Case Against Leaning Against the Wind
The authors study the benefits and costs of leaning against the wind (LAW)—that is, changing the conduct of monetary policy in response to a build-up of financial vulnerabilities—in a flexible, non-parametric model of the dynamic interactions between monetary policy, financial conditions, and macroeconomic outcomes. They find that downside risk to growth increases in response to a counterfactual tightening of the path of monetary policy, suggesting there is limited evidence to support LAW.
Nina Boyarchenko, Richard K. Crump, Keshav Dogra, Leonardo Elias, and Ignacio Lopez Gaffney, Staff Report 1100, May 2024
Personal Bankruptcy Protection and Household Debt
Using changes in bankruptcy protection laws across the U.S. between 1999 and 2005, the authors revisit the question of how consumer bankruptcy protection has influenced consumer lending markets and household behavior. Among their findings: An increase in protection levels causes borrowers’ unsecured credit holdings, primarily credit card debt, to rise, while their level of secured debt, including mortgage and auto loans, remains largely unchanged; and the additional unsecured borrowing is not associated with increases in delinquency rates.
Felipe Severino, Meta Brown, and Rajashri Chakrabarti, Staff Report 1099, April 2024
Is There Hope for the Expectations Hypothesis?
The expectations hypothesis (EH) of the term structure of interest rates states that yields on government bonds reflect the average short rate expected to prevail over the life of the bond. However, the preeminent role of the EH stands in tension with the overwhelming empirical evidence stacked against it. The authors reevaluate the evidence and find that not only is the EH decisively rejected in the data, but model-implied short-rate expectations generally display, at best, only a weak co-movement with the forward rates of corresponding maturities.
Richard K. Crump, Stefano Eusepi, and Emanuel Moench, Staff Report 1098, April 2024
The Life-Cycle Dynamics of Wealth Mobility
Do rich and poor people remain that way throughout their lives? The authors use twenty-five years of tax records for the Norwegian population to study the mobility of wealth over people’s lifetimes, finding considerable wealth mobility over the life cycle. The authors show parental wealth is the key predictor of who is persistently rich or poor, while human capital is the main predictor of those who rise and fall through the middle of the distribution.
Richard Audoly, Rory McGee, Sergio Ocampo, and Gonzalo Paz-Pardo, Staff Report 1097, April 2024
Geopolitical Risk and Decoupling: Evidence from U.S. Export Controls
Amid the current U.S.-China technological race, the U.S. has imposed export controls to deny China access to strategic technologies. The authors document that these measures prompted a broad-based decoupling of U.S. and Chinese supply chains. As a result of these disruptions, affected suppliers have negative abnormal stock returns, wiping out $130 billion in market capitalization, and experience a drop in bank lending, profitability, and employment.
Matteo Crosignani, Lina Han, Marco Macchiavelli, and André F. Silva, Staff Report 1096, April 2024
By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Statement. You can learn more about how we use cookies by reviewing our Privacy Statement.   Close