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Economic Research

Beverly Hirtle Named Executive Vice President and Director of Research

As head of the Research and Statistics Group, Ms. Hirtle will oversee a group that provides analytic support for the Bank’s responsibilities relating to monetary policy, banking supervision, payments systems and financial market issues.

Liberty Street Economics

Now on Your iPhone: The Economic Research Tracker

Whether you upgrade to the iPhone 7 or not, you should download the New York Fed’s Economic Research Tracker app, now available for the iPhone®. The free app, which provides access to all Liberty Street Economics blog posts and to profiles of the Bank’s economists, is also available for the iPad®.

By Joe Tracy

The Changing Face of the Higher Education Market

Enrollment in colleges and universities has surged in recent years, but what types of students are registering for class? Are they older, attending part-time? The answer may have implications for the composition of skilled workers in the labor market, earnings, student-debt management, and by extension for growth in the national economy.

By Rajashri Chakrabarti, Michael Lovenheim, and Kevin Morris

The Changing Higher Education Landscape

College enrollment has grown significantly since 2000, largely driven by for-profit schools. Our bloggers analyze the evolution of the different sectors of the higher education market as a basis for understanding the possible implications for that market, as well as the potential consequences for the labor force and the broader economy.

By Rajashri Chakrabarti, Michael Lovenheim, and Kevin Morris

Historical Echoes: That’s Where the Celebrity Advertising Was, or the Gentleman Bank Robber

“Because that’s where the money is”: It’s a humorous rationale for robbing banks that’s often, but mistakenly, attributed to real-life bank robber Willie Sutton. After serving time, Sutton went back to where the money is—so to speak. In the 1970s, he became a television pitchman for a Connecticut bank’s photo-ID credit card.

By Amy Farber

Research Topics

Oil Price Dynamics Report

Our oil price decomposition, reported weekly, examines what’s behind recent fluctuations in oil prices: demand factors, supply factors, or some combination of the two?

Nowcasting Report

Weekly report tracks the evolution of the FRBNY Staff Nowcast of GDP growth and the impact of new macroeconomic data releases on the forecast.

The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates

Data updated through the first quarter of 2016 show that the unemployment rate for recent college graduates continued to fall, dropping from 4.6 to 4.2 percent, while the underemployment rate for this group edged down to 44.5 percent. However, fewer underemployed recent college graduates are finding good non-college jobs. Postings for college jobs were flat during the first quarter, while postings for non-college jobs declined.

Empire State Manufacturing Survey

Business activity edged lower in New York State, according to firms responding to the September 2016 Empire State Manufacturing Survey.

Business Leaders Survey

Activity in the region’s service sector declined for a second consecutive month, according to firms responding to the September Survey.

Supplemental Survey Report

In the September 2016 Empire State Manufacturing Survey and Business Leaders Survey, manufacturers and service firms were asked how much their overall selling prices had changed over the past year.

U.S. Economy in a Snapshot

U.S. Economy in a Snapshot is a monthly presentation designed to give you a quick and accessible look at developments in the economy.

Recent Publications

International Banking and Cross-Border Effects of Regulation: Lessons from the United States

Domestic prudential regulation can have unintended effects across borders and may be less effective in an environment where banks operate globally. The authors analyze these issues, focusing on the United States, and find evidence of both spillovers of foreign regulatory changes into the United States and cross-border effects of U.S. prudential instrument changes.

By Jose Berrospide, Ricardo Correa, Linda Goldberg, and Friederike Niepmann, Staff Reports 793, September 2016

Human Capital Investments and Expectations about Career and Family

Influential studies have identified future income as a primary motivation for making human capital investments. In this paper, the authors move beyond that to study how young people believe such investments will affect their career and family life—including expectations about marriage and spousal earnings.

By Matthew Wiswall and Basit Zafar, Staff Reports 792, August 2016

Financial Aid, Debt Management, and Socioeconomic Outcomes: Post-College Effects of Merit-Based Aid

Assessing the value of state-sponsored merit-based aid programs for undergraduates requires knowing what happens to students after college. The authors conduct what they believe to be the first study to link college transcript and financial aid data to financial-management outcomes such as credit status and homeownership.

By Judith Scott-Clayton and Basit Zafar, Staff Reports 791, August 2016

A Pilot Survey of Agent Securities Lending Activity

The Financial Stability Oversight Council has identified a lack of data on securities lending activity as a priority to be addressed. In this paper, the authors report aggregate statistics on securities lending activity based on a recently concluded pilot data collection by U.S. financial regulators.

By Viktoria Baklanova, Cecilia Caglio, Frank Keane, and Burt Porter, Staff Reports 790, August 2016

Global Variance Term Premia and Intermediary Risk Appetite

Variance swaps contain valuable information regarding investor expectations about the resolution of market uncertainty, as well as insights into investor preferences for risk across different time horizons. In this paper, the authors propose a new term-structure model to help understand the expected quantity and pricing of risk.

By Peter Van Tassel and Erik Vogt, Staff Reports 789, August 2016

Characteristic-Sorted Portfolios: Estimation and Inference

The premise behind portfolio sorting is to discover whether the expected returns of an asset are related to a certain characteristic. In this paper, the authors present a framework formalizing portfolio-sorting-based estimation and inference. They also provide guidance on how to choose the number of portfolios to draw accurate conclusions from the data.

By Matias D. Cattaneo, Richard K. Crump, Max H. Farrell, and Ernst Schaumburg, Staff Reports 788, August 2016

Tracking and Stress-Testing U.S. Household Leverage

The authors analyze household leverage—the ratio of housing debt to housing values—at the borrower level. Their stress tests to project the likely consequences of house price shocks of different severities reveal that, although the housing sector remains vulnerable to severe price declines, increased creditworthiness among today’s borrowers mitigates that effect.

By Andreas Fuster, Benedict Guttman-Kenney, and Andrew Haughwout, Staff Reports 787, August 2016

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