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Economic Research

Liberty Street Economics
New York Fed EHIs Reveal Small Business Struggles
The New York Fed’s Economic Heterogeneity Indicators (EHIs) aim to study macroeconomic outcomes experienced by various groups of people and businesses. The authors recently added a suite of indicators describing the performance of small businesses to the EHIs—both for the tri-state region and nationally. They highlight some aspects of small business profitability, revenues, employment, and indebtedness since 2019 for firms of different sizes.
By Will Aarons and Asani Sarkar
A New Dataset for Consumer Spending in the New York Fed EHIs
The authors are enhancing their 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 timelier manner than is possible using public surveys.
By Rajashri Chakrabarti, Thu Pham, Beck Pierce, and Maxim L. Pinkovskiy
Photo: clothes rolled in a box with label on it Made in France
Understating Rising Quality Means Import Price Inflation Is Overstated
It is common for price measures to consider changes in quality: a price index might fall even though listed prices are unchanged because the item’s quality has improved. However, it is difficult to measure quality changes, since it requires detailed data on all product characteristics that matter to consumers. The authors offer a novel method to infer quality changes and apply it to U.S. import price indices, finding that import price inflation based on official measures has been overstated.
By Danial Lashkari
Disability in the Labor Market: Earnings
The authors investigate differences in weekly earnings for prime-age (25-54) workers with and without disabilities. They find that, despite workers with disabilities being a very select group from prime-aged people with disabilities, they nevertheless earn considerably less than workers without disabilities. Additionally, with few exceptions, their earnings have remained roughly constant in real terms since the pre-pandemic period.
By Rajashri Chakrabarti, Thu Pham, Beck Pierce, and Maxim Pinkovskiy
Disability in the Labor Market: Employment and Participation
Among people in prime working age (25-54), around 7 percent have a disability of some kind. The authors examine how prime-aged workers with disabilities have fared in the labor market compared to the year prior to the pandemic. They show that people with disabilities are far less likely to be employed than people without disabilities; however, employment rates of those with disabilities have risen rapidly during the post-pandemic period, largely because of rising labor force participation.
By Rajashri Chakrabarti, Thu Pham, Beck Pierce, and Maxim Pinkovskiy
Measuring Labor Market Tightness: Data Update and New Web Feature
Good measures of labor market tightness are essential to predict wage inflation and calibrate monetary policy. In October 2024, the authors introduced a new labor market tightness indicator and showed how it tracked wage inflation the best out of a broad range of measures. They now update their index through 2025 and demonstrate how it forecasts future wage inflation best both in and out of sample. This index will be regularly updated on the New York Fed’s website.
By Sebastian Heise, Jeremy Pearce, and Jacob Weber
Recruiting Opportunities
Ph.D. Summer Internship Opportunities
The New York Fed’s Research Group offers paid summer internships for economics and finance Ph.D. students during which participants can further their dissertation research, engage with staff economists, and obtain feedback on their work. Applications are open through March 9 for summer 2026 positions.
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
AI generated, people walking in office building.
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 worsened for recent college graduates at the end of 2025. The unemployment rate climbed to about 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025 from an average of 5.3 percent during the third quarter, and the underemployment rate rose to 42.5 percent—its highest level since 2020.
Recent Publications
The Payoffs of Higher Pay: Labor Supply and Productivity Responses to a Voluntary Firm Minimum Wage
What are the returns to firms of paying more? The authors study a Fortune 500 firm’s voluntary firm-wide $15/hour minimum wage. Using a continuous difference-in-differences design, they find that a $1/hour pay increase halves worker departures, reduces absenteeism, and increases productivity. They develop a simple model that connects efficiency-wage incentives and monopsony power, showing how these forces can counterbalance each other to keep wages closer to workers’ marginal revenues.
Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington, Staff Report 1182, February 2026
Bank Failures: The Roles of Solvency and Liquidity
Bank failures can stem from runs on otherwise solvent banks or from losses that render banks insolvent, regardless of withdrawals. Disentangling the relative importance of liquidity and solvency in explaining bank failures is central to understanding financial crises and designing effective financial stability policies. The authors review evidence on the causes of bank failures and find that bank failures—both with and without runs—are almost always related to poor fundamentals.
Sergio Correia, Stephan Luck, and Emil Verner, Staff Report 1181, February 2026
Programming Money Without Programmable Money
Innovations in money and payments have brought forth the potential for enabling programmability. This could support a wide range of arrangements and transactions that automatically execute and settle when certain conditions are met. The discourse on programmability inadequately differentiates between programmable money, which is generally negatively viewed, and programmable payments, which is generally accepted as part of the future. They provide a framework for programmable monetary systems that distinguishes between programmable money and programmable payments.
Michael Junho Lee and Antoine Martin, Staff Report 1180, February 2026
Stablecoins vs. Tokenized Deposits: The Narrow Banking Debate Revisited
As blockchain-based economic activity has developed in recent years, demand has grown for a blockchain-native or “tokenized” form of money denominated in a traditional unit of account, especially the U.S. dollar. The authors study how the type of money used in blockchain-based trade affects interest rates, investment, and welfare, using a dynamic general equilibrium model of money and exchange that highlights similarities between this current policy issue and historical debates in money and banking.
Xuesong Huang and Todd Keister, Staff Report 1179, February 2026
Interest Rate Surprises When the Fed Doesn’t Speak
The predictability of monetary policy surprises based on past, public information has been interpreted in two related yet fundamentally different ways. The “Fed information effect” attributes it to markets updating their view of the economy based on signals revealed by the FOMC. The “Fed reaction to news” explanation posits that markets update their view of the FOMC’s reaction function instead. The authors explore these by comparing the features of interest rate surprises calculated around both Fed and non-Fed events.
Silvia Miranda-Agrippino and John C. Williams, Staff Report 1178, February 2026
Composable Finance
Composability is a design principle of components that can be selected, assembled, and reassembled to satisfy specific user requirements. The author documents the emerging practice of “composed asset transformation,” in which tokenized assets are restructured to alter the liquidity, access, and risk characteristics of tokenized U.S. dollar instruments. He argues that “naive” composability fundamentally conflicts with the provision of pooled arrangements needed for liquidity provision, risk-sharing, and capital backstops, and offers principles and direction for building a sustainable, composable system.
Michael Junho Lee, Staff Report 1177, January 2026
Transformed Intermediation: Credit Risk to NBFIs, Liquidity Risk to Banks
The authors argue that the rapid asset growth of nonbank financial intermediaries (NBFIs) relative to banks is the outcome of the transformation of risks that increase the interconnectedness of the two sectors. Banks fund NBFIs through senior loans and credit lines, which NBFIs use for acquiring junior credit claims, warehouse financing, and liquidity management. The authors demonstrate that shocks experienced by NBFIs spill over to the banks providing them with credit lines, particularly in times of stress.
Viral V. Acharya, Nicola Cetorelli, and Bruce Tuckman, Staff Report 1176, January 2026
Deposit Specialization and Lending Behavior
The authors examine how banks’ depositor composition shapes lending behavior, using granular supervisory data on deposits, loans, and securities for the largest U.S. banks. Classifying banks by depositor specialization, they find persistent differences in funding that translate to differences in asset allocations. They argue that asset and liability choices are jointly determined, and depositor composition is a defining dimension of bank heterogeneity. Recognizing this heterogeneity is key for theory, policy design, and prudential regulation.
Kristian Blickle, Cecilia Parlatore, and Anthony Saunders, Staff Report 1175, December 2025
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