Key reasons for the existence of cities are the externalities created when people cluster together in close proximity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, such interactions came with health risks and people found other ways to interact. This article documents how cities changed during COVID-19 and considers how the persistence of new ways of interacting, particularly remote work, will shape the development of cities in the future. It first summarizes evidence showing how residential and commercial prices and activity adjusted at different distances from dense city centers during and since the pandemic. The analysis employs a textbook monocentric city model to demonstrate that two adjustments associated with remote work—reduced commuting times and increased housing demand—generate the patterns observed in the data. The authors then consider how these effects might be magnified by changes in urban amenities and agglomeration forces, and what such forces might mean for the future of cities.
{"title":"COVID and Cities, Thus Far","authors":"Gilles Duranton, Jessie Handbury","doi":"10.59576/epr.29.2.6-52","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.59576/epr.29.2.6-52","url":null,"abstract":"Key reasons for the existence of cities are the externalities created when people cluster together in close proximity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, such interactions came with health risks and people found other ways to interact. This article documents how cities changed during COVID-19 and considers how the persistence of new ways of interacting, particularly remote work, will shape the development of cities in the future. It first summarizes evidence showing how residential and commercial prices and activity adjusted at different distances from dense city centers during and since the pandemic. The analysis employs a textbook monocentric city model to demonstrate that two adjustments associated with remote work—reduced commuting times and increased housing demand—generate the patterns observed in the data. The authors then consider how these effects might be magnified by changes in urban amenities and agglomeration forces, and what such forces might mean for the future of cities.","PeriodicalId":51713,"journal":{"name":"Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis Review","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136118604","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article considers the use of racial equity analysis, or racial equity planning, as a tool to remedy the inequality that has been structured into the built environment through past and ongoing discriminatory and racially insensitive land use regulations and planning. It describes the history of land use planning in the United States, the resulting legacy of exclusionary practices, and the need to explicitly address racial inequities in American cities by considering the impacts of large-scale planning projects. As an illustration, the author describes a racial disparity report that studied the likely effects of a proposed development in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y. The article also discusses the promise, limitations, and possible unintended consequences of racial equity planning, including NIMBYism and the use of studies to thwart development generally.
{"title":"The Promises and Perils of Racial Equity Planning","authors":"Lance Freeman","doi":"10.59576/epr.29.2.75-87","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.59576/epr.29.2.75-87","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the use of racial equity analysis, or racial equity planning, as a tool to remedy the inequality that has been structured into the built environment through past and ongoing discriminatory and racially insensitive land use regulations and planning. It describes the history of land use planning in the United States, the resulting legacy of exclusionary practices, and the need to explicitly address racial inequities in American cities by considering the impacts of large-scale planning projects. As an illustration, the author describes a racial disparity report that studied the likely effects of a proposed development in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y. The article also discusses the promise, limitations, and possible unintended consequences of racial equity planning, including NIMBYism and the use of studies to thwart development generally.","PeriodicalId":51713,"journal":{"name":"Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis Review","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135708093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Post-COVID, New York City faces reduced demand for commercial space in its central business districts, even as residential demand is resurgent. Just as in past eras of New York’s history, conversion of commercial spaces into housing may help the city adapt to these new market conditions and provide an additional pathway for producing badly needed housing. If 10 percent of office and hotel spaces were converted to residential use, around 75,000 homes would be created, concentrated in Midtown Manhattan. However, there are considerable obstacles to such conversions, including a slew of regulatory barriers. Allowing greater flexibility in building uses—including by reducing the distinction between short- and long-term use and rethinking the separation of uses embedded in the city’s zoning code—could help facilitate these shifts.
{"title":"Flexibility and Conversions in New York City's Housing Stock: Building for an Era of Rapid Change","authors":"Ingrid Gould Ellen, Noah M. Kazis","doi":"10.59576/epr.29.2.53-74","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.59576/epr.29.2.53-74","url":null,"abstract":"Post-COVID, New York City faces reduced demand for commercial space in its central business districts, even as residential demand is resurgent. Just as in past eras of New York’s history, conversion of commercial spaces into housing may help the city adapt to these new market conditions and provide an additional pathway for producing badly needed housing. If 10 percent of office and hotel spaces were converted to residential use, around 75,000 homes would be created, concentrated in Midtown Manhattan. However, there are considerable obstacles to such conversions, including a slew of regulatory barriers. Allowing greater flexibility in building uses—including by reducing the distinction between short- and long-term use and rethinking the separation of uses embedded in the city’s zoning code—could help facilitate these shifts.","PeriodicalId":51713,"journal":{"name":"Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis Review","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136117421","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This introduction to the Economic Policy Review special issue "The Future of New York City: Charting an Equitable Recovery for All" offers highlights of all papers presented at the March 2022 conference of the same name, as well as the event's opening remarks and keynote discussion, and it previews the three papers that are included in full in the issue.
{"title":"Introduction to \"The Future of New York City: Charting an Equitable Recovery for All\"","authors":"Andrew F. Haughwout","doi":"10.59576/epr.29.2.1-5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.59576/epr.29.2.1-5","url":null,"abstract":"This introduction to the Economic Policy Review special issue \"The Future of New York City: Charting an Equitable Recovery for All\" offers highlights of all papers presented at the March 2022 conference of the same name, as well as the event's opening remarks and keynote discussion, and it previews the three papers that are included in full in the issue.","PeriodicalId":51713,"journal":{"name":"Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis Review","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135706985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-17DOI: 10.18651/er/v108n4cohenshampine
Elior Cohen, Samantha Shampine
Elior Cohen is an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Samantha Shampine is a former research associate at the bank. This article is on the bank’s website at www.KansasCityFed.org The U.S. workforce relies heavily on immigration, with one out of every six workers originating from outside the country’s borders in 2021. However, the supply of new immigrant labor has varied widely over the past decade. Although an average of 1 million immigrants entered the country annually from 2000 to 2016, a series of policy changes and the COVID-19 pandemic led to a rare decline in immigrant arrivals from 2016 to 2021. This period of reduced immigration coincided with and exacerbated already severe labor shortages in the U.S. labor market, leading employers and firms to look for new sources of labor. In recent years, online job postings have become more prevalent as a method of searching for labor. In addition to providing information on the overall demand for labor in the economy, online postings contain rich data on a job’s characteristics, location, industry, offered wages, and skill requirements. These data could help reveal how different dimensions of labor demand change in response to declining immigration. However, little is known about the link between immigration and online job postings. In this article, we examine how declining immigration flows influence online job vacancies in labor markets with different levels of reliance on immigrant labor. We find that the growth rate of online job postings
{"title":"Do Immigration Restrictions Affect Job Vacancies? Evidence from Online Job Postings","authors":"Elior Cohen, Samantha Shampine","doi":"10.18651/er/v108n4cohenshampine","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18651/er/v108n4cohenshampine","url":null,"abstract":"Elior Cohen is an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Samantha Shampine is a former research associate at the bank. This article is on the bank’s website at www.KansasCityFed.org The U.S. workforce relies heavily on immigration, with one out of every six workers originating from outside the country’s borders in 2021. However, the supply of new immigrant labor has varied widely over the past decade. Although an average of 1 million immigrants entered the country annually from 2000 to 2016, a series of policy changes and the COVID-19 pandemic led to a rare decline in immigrant arrivals from 2016 to 2021. This period of reduced immigration coincided with and exacerbated already severe labor shortages in the U.S. labor market, leading employers and firms to look for new sources of labor. In recent years, online job postings have become more prevalent as a method of searching for labor. In addition to providing information on the overall demand for labor in the economy, online postings contain rich data on a job’s characteristics, location, industry, offered wages, and skill requirements. These data could help reveal how different dimensions of labor demand change in response to declining immigration. However, little is known about the link between immigration and online job postings. In this article, we examine how declining immigration flows influence online job vacancies in labor markets with different levels of reliance on immigrant labor. We find that the growth rate of online job postings","PeriodicalId":51713,"journal":{"name":"Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis Review","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76628728","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ag banks likely altered some of their strategic portfolio decisions after an FCS merger in their local credit market. Commercial banks and the Farm Credit System (FCS) have been the most important sources of agricultural loans in the United States in recent decades. Since the 1990s, however, mergers and acquisitions have increasingly concentrated both the FCS and commercial banks, raising concerns about potential effects on the agricultural credit market. Starting in the 2000s, the FCS gained a substantial market share of total agricultural debt, lending credibility to these concerns. Thus far, however, how the FCS’s evolving size and scope affect agricultural bank operations, particularly through mergers, has not been adequately examined. Francisco Scott explores the effects of FCS mergers on agricultural banks (ag banks) and finds that FCS mergers have had mostly muted long-term aggregate effects on ag banks’ interest income, efficiency
{"title":"How Mergers in the Farm Credit System Have Affected Ag Banks","authors":"Francisco Scott","doi":"10.18651/er/v108n3scott","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18651/er/v108n3scott","url":null,"abstract":"Ag banks likely altered some of their strategic portfolio decisions after an FCS merger in their local credit market. Commercial banks and the Farm Credit System (FCS) have been the most important sources of agricultural loans in the United States in recent decades. Since the 1990s, however, mergers and acquisitions have increasingly concentrated both the FCS and commercial banks, raising concerns about potential effects on the agricultural credit market. Starting in the 2000s, the FCS gained a substantial market share of total agricultural debt, lending credibility to these concerns. Thus far, however, how the FCS’s evolving size and scope affect agricultural bank operations, particularly through mergers, has not been adequately examined. Francisco Scott explores the effects of FCS mergers on agricultural banks (ag banks) and finds that FCS mergers have had mostly muted long-term aggregate effects on ag banks’ interest income, efficiency","PeriodicalId":51713,"journal":{"name":"Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis Review","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86181389","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Traditional credit scores do not always reflect a consumer’s creditworthiness and may drive disparities in credit access.
传统的信用评分并不总是反映消费者的信誉,可能会导致信贷渠道的差异。
{"title":"Addressing Traditional Credit Scores as a Barrier to Accessing Affordable Credit","authors":"Ying Lei Toh","doi":"10.18651/er/v108n3toh","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18651/er/v108n3toh","url":null,"abstract":"Traditional credit scores do not always reflect a consumer’s creditworthiness and may drive disparities in credit access.","PeriodicalId":51713,"journal":{"name":"Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis Review","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85035888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.18651/er/v108n3bigulatitraum
Huixin Bi, Chaitri Gulati, Nora Traum
{"title":"Understanding State and Local Government Spending over the Business Cycle","authors":"Huixin Bi, Chaitri Gulati, Nora Traum","doi":"10.18651/er/v108n3bigulatitraum","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18651/er/v108n3bigulatitraum","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51713,"journal":{"name":"Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis Review","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88946342","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-11DOI: 10.18651/er/v108n2marshlaliberte
W. Marsh, Brendan Laliberte
Lower securities valuations have reduced banks’ liquidity and capital, potentially dampening loan growth. Interest rates have risen across the yield curve since the Federal Open Market Committee began tightening monetary policy in March 2022. After amassing securities during the pandemic, commercial banks saw rising interest rates erode the value of their securities portfolios by nearly $600 billion, or about 30 percent of their capital holdings. In some cases, declines in valuation of securities holdings in response to interest rate changes—known as “unrealized losses”—can mechanically reduce key regulatory capital and liquidity ratios. Should banks need to sell the securities to generate income when their valuations are low, the realized losses could erode capital buffers and threaten the banks’ solvency. W. Blake Marsh and
{"title":"The Implications of Unrealized Losses for Banks","authors":"W. Marsh, Brendan Laliberte","doi":"10.18651/er/v108n2marshlaliberte","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18651/er/v108n2marshlaliberte","url":null,"abstract":"Lower securities valuations have reduced banks’ liquidity and capital, potentially dampening loan growth. Interest rates have risen across the yield curve since the Federal Open Market Committee began tightening monetary policy in March 2022. After amassing securities during the pandemic, commercial banks saw rising interest rates erode the value of their securities portfolios by nearly $600 billion, or about 30 percent of their capital holdings. In some cases, declines in valuation of securities holdings in response to interest rate changes—known as “unrealized losses”—can mechanically reduce key regulatory capital and liquidity ratios. Should banks need to sell the securities to generate income when their valuations are low, the realized losses could erode capital buffers and threaten the banks’ solvency. W. Blake Marsh and","PeriodicalId":51713,"journal":{"name":"Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis Review","volume":"67 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81002507","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-09DOI: 10.18651/er/v108n2dohvandermeer
Tae-Yong Doh, Luca Van der Meer
Taeyoung Doh is a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Luca Van der Meer is a research associate at the bank. This article is on the bank’s website at www.KansasCityFed.org The U.S. federal minimum wage has been fixed at $7.25 since 2009; meanwhile, the U.S. economy has been anything but static. A decade of modest growth, a seismic pandemic, and a recent period of high inflation have all combined to erode the spending power of a $7.25 minimum wage. Income disparity has also grown over the last decade: a standard index for measuring income dispersion, the Gini coefficient, has grown substantially. To address these problems, as early as 2015 U.S. legislators introduced a proposal to increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour, but this proposal never reached fruition. One challenge in implementing minimum wage increases is estimating the potential effect on employment. Although moving to a $15 federal minimum wage would not be as dramatic an increase in 2022 as in 2015 due to nominal wage increases over those seven years, such an increase would still be historically unprecedented. As a result, past modest increases in the U.S. federal minimum wage are unlikely to provide much insight into employment effects. One alternative is to examine minimum wage changes at the state or local level, as individual states and cities have instituted comparably large minimum wage changes. However, studies on state and local wage changes
Taeyoung Doh是堪萨斯城联邦储备银行的高级经济学家。卢卡·范德米尔(Luca Van der Meer)是该银行的研究员。自2009年以来,美国联邦最低工资一直固定在7.25美元;与此同时,美国经济一点也不停滞。十年的温和增长,一场地震般的流行病,以及最近一段时间的高通胀,所有这些都削弱了7.25美元最低工资的消费能力。在过去十年中,收入差距也在扩大:衡量收入差距的标准指数——基尼系数——大幅增长。为了解决这些问题,早在2015年,美国立法者就提出了将联邦最低工资从每小时7.25美元提高到每小时15美元的提案,但该提案从未取得成果。提高最低工资的一个挑战是估计对就业的潜在影响。尽管由于这7年名义工资的增长,2022年联邦最低工资15美元的增幅不会像2015年那么大,但这样的增幅仍将是历史上前所未有的。因此,过去美国联邦最低工资的适度增长不太可能对就业影响提供太多见解。另一种选择是检查州或地方一级的最低工资变化,因为个别州和城市已经制定了相对较大的最低工资变化。然而,对州和地方工资变化的研究
{"title":"The Employment Effect of an Increase in the National Minimum Wage: Review of International Evidence","authors":"Tae-Yong Doh, Luca Van der Meer","doi":"10.18651/er/v108n2dohvandermeer","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18651/er/v108n2dohvandermeer","url":null,"abstract":"Taeyoung Doh is a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Luca Van der Meer is a research associate at the bank. This article is on the bank’s website at www.KansasCityFed.org The U.S. federal minimum wage has been fixed at $7.25 since 2009; meanwhile, the U.S. economy has been anything but static. A decade of modest growth, a seismic pandemic, and a recent period of high inflation have all combined to erode the spending power of a $7.25 minimum wage. Income disparity has also grown over the last decade: a standard index for measuring income dispersion, the Gini coefficient, has grown substantially. To address these problems, as early as 2015 U.S. legislators introduced a proposal to increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour, but this proposal never reached fruition. One challenge in implementing minimum wage increases is estimating the potential effect on employment. Although moving to a $15 federal minimum wage would not be as dramatic an increase in 2022 as in 2015 due to nominal wage increases over those seven years, such an increase would still be historically unprecedented. As a result, past modest increases in the U.S. federal minimum wage are unlikely to provide much insight into employment effects. One alternative is to examine minimum wage changes at the state or local level, as individual states and cities have instituted comparably large minimum wage changes. However, studies on state and local wage changes","PeriodicalId":51713,"journal":{"name":"Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis Review","volume":"774 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84228288","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}