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Economic Research

Photo: Back view of a student wearing an academic robe carrying a large bag on his back with the words "DEBT" written on it, a concept of students burdened by expensive education costs.
Student Loan Delinquencies Are Back, and Credit Scores Take a Tumble
Overall household debt rose by $167 billion over the first quarter of 2025, according to the latest Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit from the New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data. The delinquency rate for student loans surged from below 1 to nearly 8 percent, as the pause on reporting delinquent federal student loans ended. The authors focus on student loan delinquency, including which borrowers are past due and its effect on their access to credit.
By Andrew F. Haughwout, Donghoon Lee, Daniel Mangrum, Joelle Scally, and Wilbert van der Klaauw
Who Finances Real Sector Lenders?
The modern financial system is complex, with funding flowing not just from the financial sector to the real sector but within the financial sector through an intricate network of financial claims. While the authors’ previous work focused on understanding the end result of these flows, here they explore how accounting for interlinkages across the financial sector changes their perception of who finances credit to the real sector.
By Nina Boyarchenko, Hyuntae Choi, and Leonardo Elias
Gauging the Strength of China’s Economy in Uncertain Times
In this post, the authors provide an update on China’s recent economic performance and policy changes. At present, China’s “credit impulse”—the change in the flow of new aggregate credit to the economy relative to GDP—appears likely sufficient to allow it to muddle through with steady but not strong growth over the next year despite the intensifying trade conflict with the U.S.
By Jeffrey B. Dawson and Hunter L. Clark
Stablecoins and Crypto Shocks: An Update
Stablecoins are crypto assets whose value is pegged to that of a fiat currency, usually the U.S. dollar. The authors document the growth of stablecoins since 2019, including the evolution of the reported collateral backing major stablecoins. They then estimate the impact on the stablecoin industry of large bitcoin price increases that occurred between 2021 and 2025. Their results indicate that the demand for stablecoins grows along with the demand for non-stablecoin crypto assets.
By Kenechukwu Anadu, Pablo D. Azar, Marco Cipriani, Thomas Eisenbach, Catherine Huang, Mattia Landoni, Gabriele La Spada, Marco Macchiavelli, Antoine Malfroy-Camine, and J. Christina Wang
The Origins of Market Power in DeFi
The authors build on their previous research about decentralized finance (DeFi) on the Ethereum network, summarizing the empirical results of data collected from September 2022 to January 2024. They use this comprehensive dataset to map out the relationships between different players in the Ethereum ecosystem and understand the economic incentives at play, with their main goal being to explore how access to private transactions affects a block builder's share of profits.
By Pablo D. Azar, Adrian G. Casillas, and Maryam Farboodi
Is College Still Worth It?
Concerns about the rising cost of college and the struggles of recent college graduates to find good jobs have left many Americans wondering whether college is still worth it. The authors offer an economic perspective on the value of a college degree, examining the costs, benefits, and return for the typical college graduate. They estimate college’s rate of return at 12.5 percent, a rate well above the threshold for a sound investment.
By Jaison R. Abel and Richard Deitz
RESEARCH TOPICS
The Price of Processing: Information Frictions and Market Efficiency in DeFi
A central question in financial economics concerns price discovery, or how new information be-comes embedded in asset prices. The authors study this question within the context of hacks in decentralized finance (DeFi). They precisely time both when the hacks begin on the public blockchain record and when the news is later announced on social media, becoming common knowledge. Their central finding is that prices move significantly before the news becomes common knowledge.
Pablo D. Azar, Sergio Olivas, and Nish D. Sinha, Staff Report 1153, April 2025
Component-Based Dynamic Factor Nowcast Model
The authors propose a component-based dynamic factor model for nowcasting GDP growth, evaluating its performance against existing models. They demonstrate that, on average, the performance of the standard dynamic factor model can be improved by 15 percent and its density nowcast performance can be improved by 20 percent over a large historical sample.
Hannah O’Keeffe and Katerina Petrova, Staff Report 1152, April 2025
Uniform Inference with General Autoregressive Processes
Imposing short memory assumptions in macroeconomic and financial models is convenient, since it delivers standard econometric inference on the models’ parameters with conventional asymptotic distributions. However, such stationarity assumptions are often empirically unrealistic. The authors propose a unified, distribution-free framework for inference in autoregressive, predictive regression, and local projection models, when the regressor’s autoregressive root is in (-∞, ∞). They demonstrate how their procedure can be used to construct valid confidence intervals in standard epidemiological models.
Tassos Magdalinos and Katerina Petrova, Staff Report 1151, April 2025
How Do We Learn About the Long Run?
The authors provide novel empirical and theoretical insights into how professional forecasters form and revise long-run expectations. Using a novel and unique panel dataset of individual-level professional forecasts across multiple horizons, the authors show that long-horizon expectations display considerable heterogeneity across forecasters, evolve dynamically in response to short-run developments, and are shaped by multivariate considerations. Their findings challenge the conventional assumption of anchored or rational long-run expectations and motivate models in which information frictions are relevant at short- and long-run horizons.
Richard K. Crump, Stefano Eusepi, Emanuel Moench, and Bruce Preston, Staff Report 1150, April 2025
The Risk Sensitivity of Global Liquidity Flows: Heterogeneity, Evolution, and Drivers
The period after the global financial crisis (GFC) was characterized by a considerable risk migration within global liquidity flows, away from cross-border bank lending toward international bond issuance. The authors investigate the drivers of these global risk sensitivities and the determinants of the post-GFC risk migration. They also examine the shifting drivers of global liquidity across its main components (cross-border and international bonds), borrowing country groups (advanced and emerging market economies), and borrowing sectors (bank and non-bank).
Stefan Avdjiev, Leonardo Gambacorta, Linda S. Goldberg, and Stefano Schiaffi, Staff Report 1149, April 2025
Subjective Uncertainty and the Marginal Propensity to Consume
Earnings uncertainty is central to most heterogeneous-household models. Yet, there is surprisingly little evidence on how subjective uncertainty is related to consumption behavior. Using unique data from the New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations, the authors show that the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is increasing and concave in individual specific earnings growth uncertainty.
Gizem Koşar and Davide Melcangi, Staff Report 1148, April 2025
Tradeoffs for the Poor, Divine Coincidence for the Rich
Monetary policymakers face a tradeoff between the variability of inflation and real activity. However, both the experience of recent decades and the heterogeneous agent New Keynesian (HANK) literature developed over the same period make it clear that such tradeoffs may be very different for different households. The authors use an estimated medium-scale HANK model to investigate how the tradeoff between stabilizing inflation and consumption volatility varies for households with different levels of wealth.
Marco Del Negro, Ibrahima Diagne, Keshav Dogra, Pranay Gundam, Donggyu Lee, and Brian Pacula, Staff Report 1147, April 2025
U.S. Treasury Market Functioning from the GFC to the Pandemic
The authors examine U.S. Treasury securities market functioning from the global financial crisis (GFC) through the Covid-19 pandemic, given the ensuing market developments and associated policy responses. They describe factors that have meaningfully affected liquidity provision since the GFC and discuss the effects of these changes in both normal times and times of stress, concluding with a discussion of policy implications, including recent policy initiatives that are intended to promote market resilience.
Tobias Adrian, Michael Fleming, and Kleopatra Nikolaou, Staff Report 1146, April 2025
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