Income inequality has increased in the St. Louis Fed's District over the past 30 years, although at a slower pace than in the nation as a whole. In both areas, the inequality is increasing primarily between the top-income earners and the middle-income earners.

FOMC statements have grown more complicated since the onset of unconventional monetary policy.

The ability to retire at an age and in a manner of one’s choosing depends on one’s ability to retain or find employment at older ages, which depends in turn on local labor market conditions. We investigate how local labor markets affect retirement transitions. We match households from the...

A key question that has arisen during recent debates is whether government spending multipliers are larger during times when resources are idle. This paper seeks to shed light on this question by analyzing new quarterly historical data covering multiple large wars and depressions in the U.S. and...

In this paper, we propose a new family of multivariate loss functions that can be used to test the rationality of vector forecasts without assuming independence across individual variables. When only one variable is of interest, the loss function reduces to the flexible asymmetric family...

We find that the magnitudes of the regional effects of monetary policy were considerably dampened during the Volcker-Greenspan era. For this era, regional differences in the depths and total costs of monetary-policy-induced recessions were related to the concentration of the banking sector.