Paper for a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York entitled Financial Innovation and Monetary Transmission

The 1990s have seen astonishing growth in the stock market portfolios of Americans, which many have argued has been a major force behind the growth of consumer spending. This paper reviews the relationship between the stock market and the consumer. Using a variety of econometric techniques and...

Business surveys often give early signals of the direction and magnitude of economic activity. One release, the relatively new Empire State Manufacturing Survey, is demonstrating an ability to provide information ahead of U.S. production and employment trends. In fact, the predictive power of...

A two-year-long economic downturn and a persistent income gap with the U.S. mainland contribute to an uncertain outlook for Puerto Rico. Still, the commonwealth possesses a skilled and educated workforce, a favorable business climate, and the benefits of U.S. legal and financial structures -...

The U.S. personal saving rate's negative turn in 2005 has raised concerns that Americans may have to curtail their spending and accept a lower standard of living as they pay off rising debts. However, a closer look at saving trends suggests that the risks to household well-being are overstated....

The sharp divergence in the 2001 recession between two key economic indicators-manufacturing production and goods output-could suggest that one indicator is flawed, casting doubt on the reliability of its overall series. This analysis finds no evidence of error. Rather, the strength of spending...

The current expansion has seen record-high levels of transactions in housing, extraordinary growth in the aggregate value of owner-occupied housing, and large increases in the amount of funds realized from the refinancing of mortgage debt. Many analysts thus have pointed to the strong housing...

This paper provides a review of the concept of core inflation and evaluates the performance of several proposed measures. We first consider the rationale of a central bank in setting its inflation goal in terms of a selected rate of consumer price growth and the use of a core inflation measure...

Economists, business analysts, and policymakers have all focused considerable attention on U.S. productivity growth in recent years. This paper presents a broad overview of productivity--both labor and total factor--and discusses why it is such an important topic. We begin with the official U.S....