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Economic Research

Liberty Street Economics
Are Rising Employee Health Insurance Costs Dampening Wage Growth?
Employer-sponsored health insurance costs have climbed by about 25 percent over the past five years, with particularly steep increases in the past three years. The authors’ February regional business surveys asked firms whether their wage-setting decisions were influenced by these rising costs. The respondents indicated that absent these cost increases, they would have raised wages by roughly an additional percentage point, on average, suggesting that rising health insurance costs resulted in a drag on wage growth.
By Jaison R. Abel, Richard Deitz, and Nick Montalbano
Firms’ Inflation Expectations Return to 2024 Levels
The New York Fed’s February surveys of firms in the New York-Northern New Jersey region find that these businesses experienced substantial cost pressures in 2025 as the cost of insurance and utilities rose sharply, while an increase in tariffs contributed to rising goods and materials costs. The authors find that, while both cost and price increases intensified last year, these do not contribute to firms believing that inflation will be on the rise in the short or longer term.
By Jaison R. Abel, Richard Deitz, and Nick Montalbano
What’s Driving Rising Business Costs?
After a period of moderating cost increases, firms grappled with substantial cost increases across many categories in the past year. The authors analyze cost and price dynamics among businesses in the New York-Northern New Jersey region based on data collected through their regional business surveys. Firms reported that the sharpest cost increases over the past year were for employee health insurance and utilities, followed by business insurance, and goods and materials inputs.
By Jaison R. Abel, Richard Deitz, and Nick Montalbano
Photo: Illustration of a flat world map with a percent sign between north America content and Europe/Africa continents. Colored in dark blue and golds.
The Post-Pandemic Global R*
The authors provide a measure of global r* using data on short- and long-term yields and inflation for several countries. They find that, after declining significantly from the 1990s to before the COVID-19 pandemic, global r* has risen but remains well below its pre-1990s level. These conclusions are based on an econometric model called “trendy VAR” that extracts common trends across a multitude of variables.
By Marco Del Negro, Elena Elbarmi, and Michael Pham
Image of a bond market yields, fixed-income securities, mortgage rates monitor.
Estimating the Term Structure of Corporate Bond Risk Premia
Understanding how short- and long-term assets are priced is one of the fundamental questions in finance. The term structure of risk premia allows us to perform net present value calculations, test asset pricing models, and potentially explain the sources of many cross-sectional asset pricing anomalies. The author constructs a forward-looking estimate of the term structure of risk premia in the corporate bond market and finds that risk premia play a meaningful role in shaping the term structure of returns.
By Tomas Jankauskas
What Workplace Composition Are Job Candidates Looking For?
Why do workers still segregate by sex across occupations, industries, and firms? Recent research has focused on how preferences for job amenities may differ by sex. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the sex composition of a job itself. To explore this issue, the author conducted a survey experiment to estimate men’s and women’s preferences for sex composition in the workplace, finding that women and young single men prefer jobs with at least half female coworkers.
By Rachel Schuh
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
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
Intraday Price Pressure and Order Flow Around U.S. Treasury Auctions
U.S. Treasury securities attract strong investor demand, enabling the U.S. Treasury Department to issue debt at favorable rates at regular auctions. Using 33 years of intraday Treasury data, the authors provide the first high-frequency evidence on auction-day price pressure: yields rise in the hours before auction and reverse afterward. Also, net order flow dominates in explaining the pressure, providing the first direct evidence that trading transmits dealer constraints into prices.
Michael Fleming, Weiling Liu, and Giang Nguyen, Staff Report 1188, March 2026
When Long-Run Trends Are Unknown: Bond Pricing Implications
The term structure of Treasury yields is key to bond investors’ information sets and forecasts. It also helps policymakers assess economic conditions and calibrate policy stances. Central to this is the long-run neutral real rate of interest, r-star; however, r-star is inherently unobservable and must be inferred from imperfect models and data. The authors propose a new model that quantifies how much the Treasury yield curve can imply about r-star when bond investors face uncertainty about its true level.
Borel Ahonon and Guillaume Roussellet, Staff Report 1187, March 2026
Systemic Cyber Risk
Cyber risk has grown to be broadly recognized as a source of vulnerability for financial stability, with virtually every layer of the financial system architecture having experienced a material cyber attack in the last five years. The authors propose a quantitative framework to track systemic risk arising from cyber vulnerabilities of the U.S. financial system. Synthesizing financial, economic, cyber, and network data, they develop an index that tracks financial-system-level cyber vulnerability (SCV) for the financial system.
Steven D. Baker and Michael Junho Lee, Staff Report 1186, February 2026
Stablecoin Disintermediation
Payment stablecoins enable U.S. dollar settlement on blockchains and are positioned to meet global demand for U.S. dollars. Importantly, stablecoins are accessible to anyone with internet access, standing in contrast to traditional banking. How will stablecoins impact the banking system? The authors propose a theory of stablecoin disintermediation, whereby stablecoins not only erode banks deposit franchises but also transmit liquidity stress to the banking system.
Michael Junho Lee and Donny Tou, Staff Report 1185, February 2026
Sports Betting Across Borders: Spatial Spillovers, Credit Distress, and Fiscal Externalities
In the 2018 Murphy v. NCAA decision, the Supreme Court struck down a federal law that banned sports betting in the United States. Since then, 38 states have legalized sports betting within their state boundaries, giving rise to a multi-billion-dollar mobile sports betting industry. The authors study the impact of legalized sports betting on betting intensity and consumer credit outcomes across U.S. states, with a particular focus on spillovers across state lines into states where betting remains illegal.
Jacob Goss and Daniel Mangrum, Staff Report 1184, revised March 2026
Open-Ended Treasury Purchases: From Market Functioning to Financial Easing
Central banks have employed large-scale asset purchases for two distinct objectives: to provide monetary policy accommodation when the policy rate is near zero, and to support market functioning or financial stability. The authors assess whether the Federal Reserve’s asset purchases can be tailored to either restore market functioning or provide economic stimulus by analyzing the ideal setting provided by the $2.9 trillion of Treasury purchases conducted by the Fed in 2020-2022.
Stefania D’Amico, Max Gillet, Sam Schulhofer-Wohl, and Tim Seida, Staff Report 1183, February 2026
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


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