Payment systems, and interoperation within and between them, are complicated, making analysis and dialogue among analysts, technologists, and members of the public challenging. Given the emergence of new payment mechanisms, like CBDC and private digital currency, these discussions are...

The economic returns to attending college are a crucial aspect of discussions surrounding student debt and rising tuition. As higher quality data on student outcomes has become available, studies have attempted to quantify the financial value of a college degree across different dimensions and...

An inverted yield curve—defined as an episode in which long-maturity Treasury yields fall below their short-maturity counterparts—is a powerful near-term predictor of recessions. While most previous studies focus on the predictive power of the spread between long- and short-maturity Treasury...

Recent increases in interest rates, combined with the rapid rise in house prices over the past two years, have eroded the affordability of homeownership. This note provides evidence that home purchase borrowing by below-average income households has fallen precipitously in 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic caused regressive income declines, but also led to progressive policy responses. Using administrative U.S. tax data, which are a near-universal panel dataset that can track income changes over time, we consider the distribution of annual income declines during the COVID-19...

The U.S. dollar has played a preeminent role in the global economy since the second World War. It is used as a reserve currency and the currency of denomination for a large fraction of global trade and financial transactions

The global spread of COVID-19 virus in early 2020, and the measures taken to contain it pushed the global economy into a deep contraction. As illustrated in Figure 1, global GDP fell 10.5 percent below its pre-pandemic level in the second quarter of 2020

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, sweeping production constraints, combined with surging demand in some industries, have led to shortages, severe congestion, and soaring prices. What will it take for these bottlenecks to resolve and for price pressures to ease?

Recessions impose sizable hardship, with large increases in the unemployment rate and related dislocations. In addition, recessions can lead to large shifts in financial markets. As a result, economists and financial market professionals have considered prediction models to assess the...

Fixed-income mutual funds saw massive outflows during the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, with funds investing primarily in high yield debt markets experiencing the largest redemptions, as a percentage of assets. In March 2020 alone, high yield bond (HYB) and bank loan (BL) mutual fund withdrawals...