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Although the average rate of unemployment across U.S. metropolitan areas declined between 1980 and 2000, the geographic concentration of the unemployed rose sharply over this period. That is, residential neighborhoods throughout the nation's metropolitan areas became increasingly divided into high- and low-unemployment areas. This paper documents this trend using data on more than 165,000 U.S. Census block groups (neighborhoods) in 361 metropolitan areas over the years 1980, 1990, and 2000; it also examines three potential explanations: (i) urban decentralization, (ii) industrial shifts and declining unionization, and (iii) increasing segregation by income and education. The results offer little support for either of the first two explanations. Rising residential concentration of the unemployed shows little association with changes in population density, industrial composition, or union activity. It does, however, show a significant association with both the degree of segregation according to income as well as education, suggesting that decreases in the extent to which individuals with different levels of income and education live in the same neighborhood may help account for this trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the need for a government role in insuring natural and man-made catastrophes in the United States. Although insurance markets have been stressed by major natural catastrophes, such as Hurricane Katrina, government involvement in the market for natural catastrophe insurance should be minimized to avoid crowding-out more efficient private market solutions, such as catastrophe bonds. Instead, government should facilitate the development of the private market by reducing regulatory barriers. The National Flood Insurance Program has failed to cover most property owners exposed to floods and is facing severe financial difficulties. The program needs to be drastically revised or replaced by private market alternatives, such as federal "make available" requirements with a federal reinsurance backstop. A federal role may be appropriate to insure against mega-terrorist events. However, any program should be minimally intrusive and carry a positive premium to avoid crowding-out private market alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asset-liability mismatch was a principal cause of the Savings and Loan Crisis of the 1980s. The federal government's failure to recognize the mismatch risk early on and manage it properly led to huge losses by the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, which had to be covered by taxpayers. In dealing with the problems now facing the defined-benefit pension system and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), the government seems to be making some of the same mistakes it made then. Among the causes is the fallacious belief that because pension funds have a long time horizon the risk of investing in equities is negligible. In fact, the opposite is true. Moreover, for the PBGC, the mismatch risk is magnified by moral hazard and adverse selection. Distressed companies facing the prospect of bankruptcy have an incentive to underfund their pension plans and adopt risky investment strategies; healthy companies have an incentive to terminate their plans and exit the system. The paper explores some ways to limit the costs of a potential PBGC bailout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The federal government's role as lender and insurer is very important, with over $1.4 trillion of loans and guarantees and at least $7 trillion of insured risk. Tens of millions of Americans benefit from housing loans, student loans, flood insurance, etc. Yet the federal financial institutions established to run these activities are often created almost as an afterthought, with little focus on their structure. This paper emphasizes the crucial importance of ending this neglect and recognizing how proper structure can help avoid major failures, such as the current problems at the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, and enhance successes. The author also challenges the economics profession to provide more guidance on a range of specific analytical issues with real-world implications, because economists have often failed to extend analyses derived from the private sector into useful formulations for public sector practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since New Hampshire introduced the first modern state-sponsored lottery in 1964, 41 other states plus the District of Columbia have adopted lotteries. Lottery ticket sales in the United States topped $48 billion in 2004, with state governments reaping nearly $14 billion in net lottery revenue. In this paper the authors attempt to answer the question of why some states have adopted lotteries and others have not. First, they establish a framework for analyzing the determination of public policies that highlights the roles of individual voters, interest groups, and politicians within a state as well as the influence of policies in neighboring states. The authors then introduce some general explanations for the adoption of a new tax that stress the role of economic development, fiscal health, election cycles, political parties, and geography. Next, because the lottery adoption decision is more than simply a tax decision, a number of factors specific to this decision are identified. State income, lottery adoption by neighboring states, the timing of elections, and the role of organized interest groups, especially the opposition of certain religious organizations, are significant factors explaining lottery adoption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growth of human capital, defined as the change in the fraction of a metropolitan area's labor force with a bachelor's degree, is typically viewed as generating a number of desirable outcomes, including economic growth. Yet, in spite of its importance, few empirical studies have explored why some economies accumulate more human capital than others. This paper attempts to do so using a sample of more than 200 metropolitan areas in the United States over the years 1980, 1990, and 2000. The results reveal two consistently significant correlates of human capital growth: population and the existing stock of college-educated labor. Given that population growth and human capital growth are both positively associated with education, these results suggest that the geographic distributions of population and human capital should have become more concentrated in recent decades. That is, larger, more-educated metropolitan areas should have exhibited the fastest rates of increase in both population and education and thus "pulled away" from smaller, less-educated metropolitan areas. The evidence largely supports this conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gaps between output and employment growth are often attributed to transitional phases by which the economy adjusts to shifts in the rate of trend productivity growth. Nevertheless, cyclical factors can also drive a wedge between output and employment growth. This article shows that one measure of cyclical dynamics--the expected output loss associated with a recession--helps predict the gap between output and employment growth in the coming four quarters. This measure of the output loss associated with a recession can take unexpected twists and turns as the recovery unfolds. The empirical results in this paper support the proposition that a weaker-than-expected rebound in the economy can partially mute employment growth for a time relative to output growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a panel approach to examine the effect that the government-policy environment has on the level of entrepreneurship. Specifically, the authors investigate whether marginal income tax rates and bankruptcy exemptions influence rates of entrepreneurship. Whereas previous work in the literature finds that both policies are positively related to entrepreneurship, these results show non-monotonic relationships: a U-shaped relationship between marginal tax rates and entrepreneurship and an S-shaped relationship between bankruptcy exemptions and entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes subprime lending in the mortgage market and how it has evolved through time. Subprime lending has introduced a substantial amount of risk-based pricing into the mortgage market by creating a myriad of prices and product choices largely determined by borrower credit history (mortgage and rental payments, foreclosures and bankruptcies, and overall credit scores) and down payment requirements. Although subprime lending still differs from prime lending in many ways, much of the growth (at least in the securitized portion of the market) has come in the least-risky (A-) segment of the market. In addition, lenders have imposed prepayment penalties to extend the duration of loans and required larger down payments to lower their credit risk exposure from high-risk loans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the debate over the money supply versus the interest rate as the instrument of monetary policy. Using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework, the authors examine the effects of alternative monetary policy rules on inflation persistence, the information content of monetary data, and real variables. They show that inflation persistence and the variability of inflation relative to money growth depend on whether the central bank follows a money growth rule or an interest rate rule. With a money growth rule, inflation is not persistent and the price level is much more volatile than the money supply. Those counterfactual implications are eliminated by the use of interest rate rules whether prices are sticky or not. A central bank's use of interest rate rules, however, obscures the information content of monetary aggregates and also leads to subtle problems for econometricians trying to estimate money demand functions or to identify shocks to the trend and cycle components of the money stock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on Lars Svensson's article "Targeting Versus Instrument Rules for Monetary Policy: What Is Wrong With McCallum and Nelson?," which appeared in the September/October 2005 issue of "Review (Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis)." Purpose of the article; Justification for the stated limitation of targeting rules; Views on Svensson's conclusions about the implications of consumption decisions for modeling central bank behavior.

This paper argues that a linear statistical model with homoskedastic errors cannot capture the nineteenth-century notion of a recurring cyclical pattern in key economic aggregates. A simple nonlinear alternative is proposed and used to illustrate that the dynamic behavior of unemployment seems to change over the business cycle, with the unemployment rate rising more quickly than it falls. Furthermore, many but not all economic downturns are also accompanied by a dramatic change in the dynamic behavior of short-term interest rates. It is suggested that these nonlinearities are most naturally interpreted as resulting from short-run failures in the employment and credit markets and that understanding these short-run failures is the key to understanding the nature of the business cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new explanation for the apparent slow growth in employment during the past two recoveries. The authors' explanation emphasizes dynamics within growing organizations and the intertemporal substitution of organizational restructuring. A key implication of the analysis is that recoveries from recessions following long expansions will have slower employment growth. Empirical analysis shows that the recovery that began in 1970 also exhibited slow employment growth, consistent with this prediction of the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the authors show that ignoring corporate intangible investments gives a distorted picture of the post-1990 U.S. economy. In particular, ignoring intangible investments in the late 1990s leads one to conclude that productivity growth was modest, corporate profits were low, and corporate investment was at moderate levels. In fact, the late 1990s was a boom period for productivity growth, corporate profits, and corporate investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise in U. S. wage inequality over the past two decades is commonly associated with an increase in the use of "skill-biased" technologies (e.g., computer equipment) in the workplace, yet relatively few studies have attempted to measure the direct link between the two. This paper explores the relationship among inequality, worker education levels, and workplace computer usage using a sample of 230 U.S. industries between 1983 and 2002. The results generate two primary conclusions: First, this rising inequality in the United States has been caused predominantly by increasing wage dispersion within industries rather than between industries. Second, within-industry inequality is strongly tied to both the frequency of computer usage among workers and the fraction of total employment with a college degree. Both results lend support to the idea that skill-biased technological change has been an important element in the rise of U.S. wage inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares Social Security benefits relative to those paid from private investments: specifically, whether 2003 retirees would gain more retirement income if they had invested their payroll taxes in private accounts during their working years. Three different retirement ages and four possible earnings levels are considered for two private investments-6-month CDs or the S&P 500. On average, the results suggest less than 5 percent of current retirees would receive a higher monthly benefit with Social Security. Several Social Security reform proposals are described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on a study on equity market liberalization in emerging markets. Difficulty associated with dating liberalization; Financial effects of liberalization; Real effects of liberalization on investment and growth; Evidence and concerns about the findings on liberalization and growth.

Comments on the institutional characteristics of central banks and the regimes they operate and their influence on macroeconomic performance. Spillovers between countries; Emphasis on the order of magnitude of interest elasticities that come out of most macroeconomic models; Information on aggregate demand and supply shocks.

Presents information on several articles about the monetary policy transparency. Concept of flexible-wage and flexible-price equilibrium level of output; Effect of transparency on central bank performance; Examination of responses of monetary policy to oil price shocks.

Presents the text of a lecture for the Homer Jones Lecture at the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis in Missouri which deals with the role of monetarism in shaping macroeconomic modeling and developing monetary policy by the European Central Bank and the United States Federal Reserve. Features of monetarism; Three changes in the consensus macroeconomic model; Monetary policy in Japan as of September 2001.

Comments on the study conducted by Kevin D. Hoover and Oscar Jorda which analyzed the effects of systematic monetary policy within the vector autoregression framework. Identification of the separate effects of anticipated and unanticipated monetary policy; Factors which prompted economists to tackle the effects of systematic monetary policy; Assessment of the hybrid model developed by Hoover and Jorda.

Comments on the model developed by John Taylor which illustrated how the United States Federal Reserve Bank System affect the federal funds rate. Functions of federal reserve banks for depository institutions; Implications of Taylor's model on the daily management of Federal bank reserves; Evaluation of the Trading Desk reaction function used by Taylor to describe the Desk operations of the Federal Reserve.

Reviews the key contributions in new open economy macroeconomics in the United States as of May 2001. Details on the redux open economy model; Modifications based on the specification of nominal rigidities in macroeconomic models; Directions for stochastic open economy modeling.

Provides a quantitative assessment of the potential gains available from trade liberalization under the World Trade Organization (WTO) round. Patterns of trade and protection and other structural features of the global economy; Projections of the global economy to the year 2005; Impact of further reductions in trade barriers from post-Uruguay Round base.

Summarizes the issues addressed during the Twenty-Fourth Annual Economic Policy Conference of the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis. General overview of the multilateral trade negotiations; Trade issues discussed; Analysis of potential gains; Issues that would broaden the World Trade Organization's agenda.

Comments on the paper presented by Jeffrey Schott regarding the proposed round of multilateral trade negotiations. Complex issues relating to the timeliness of the proposal; Correlation of the proposal to the 1998-1999 global financial crisis; Structural problems of the World Trade Organization which need correction.

Comments on the paper presented by Drusilla Brown regarding the labor standards issues raised in the World Trade Organization rules. Changes in the labor standards that would lead to non-violation complaints under General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Article XXIII; Provisions of the article; Consequences of the dispute settlement procedures.

Using a dynamic, multicountry model with capital accumulation, we compute the exact transition paths for 93 countries following a permanent, uniform, unanticipated trade liberalization and calculate the resulting welfare gains from trade. We find that while the dynamic gains are different across countries, consumption transition paths look similar except for scale. In addition, dynamic gains accrue gradually and are about 60 percent of steady-state gains for every country. Finally, the contribution of capital accumulation to dynamic gains is four times that of total factor productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous literature has established that the role of family income has grown substantially at predicting college entry decisions when comparing the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (e.g., Belley and Lochner (2007)). In this article, I further examine the changing role of family income as a determinant of college quality choice, degree attainment, and post-schooling earnings. I document that the role of family income has remained important and relatively stable at explaining college quality choice, its importance increasing only for the choice of four-over two-year colleges. In contrast, pre-college academic achievement has become much more important at predicting college quality choice, indicating a substantial strengthening of student college sorting. I also document that for a given college type, family income has remained an important predictor of graduation outcomes, its effect staying similar in magnitude. However, its role in explaining the post-schooling earnings of college graduates has dropped substantially. In contrast, the quality of the degree-granting college has become a much stronger determinant of both graduation outcomes and post-graduation earnings. I argue that all of these findings are consistent with the hypothesis of rising returns to college coupled with tighter financial constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a modern overview of counterterrorism tools and their trade-offs for curbing terrorist attacks and their consequences. Defensive and proactive countermeasures constitute two main classes of counterterror tools deployed by targeted governments. The primary drawback of defensive actions, which make terrorist attacks more costly and less apt to succeed, is attack transference that shifts the mode, venue, or target of attacks to those less protected. In contrast, offensive proactive measures, which confront the terrorists directly, may result in backlash as terrorist sympathizers, the public, and state sponsors augment their terrorist support resulting in more recruitment and attacks. Other essential trade-offs are identified and discussed. Additionally, we formulate a two-stage canonical game-theoretic model involving a targeted government and a terrorist group adversary. This model accounts for defensive and proactive policies but also myriad scenarios. As such, it serves as a foundation to explain the modern counterterrorism literature as illustrated by a discussion of iconic contributions to the study of counterterrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An obituary for Robert Harold Rasche, former research director of Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, is presented.

Presents a paper which identified skewness of wage changes away from wage cuts. Documentation of the key properties of the distribution of wage changes in the `Panel Study of Income Dynamics' 1971-1992 data of the United States; Introduction of the symmetrically differenced histograms, a way of detecting assymetries in wage changes; Implications on economic policy.

Do Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies play a useful social role, or do they represent a social waste? Bitcoin is a decentralized recordkeeping system, with updating of the record of transactions in the blockchain. Potentially, Bitcoin could be useful if it is widely used as a means of payment or as a safe-haven asset. But, given its properties, it is an inefficient and poorly designed means of payment and probably cannot survive as a safe haven asset. Bitcoin could encourage crime, which is a further social cost, but fortunately it may not serve criminals well either. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides information on monetary services indexes (MSI). Difference of MSI with monetary aggregates; Account on the monetary aggregates published by the Federal Reserve Board; Methodology used for measuring MSI.

Examines the basic nominal stylized facts of business cycles in the United States, using monthly data from 1960 to 1994. Comparisons among simple sum and Divisia aggregates using the Thonrton and Yue series of Divisia monetary aggregates; Robustness of the results to relevant nonstochastic transformations.

Opinion. Presents a critique of the paper `Inflation and Growth,' presented by Robert J. Barro, to the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis' 1996 Economic Policy Conference. Focus on the empirical relationship between inflation and economic growth; Theory underlying the equation; Theory underlying the estimation.

Focuses on credit card networks. General features of networks; Effects of joint ventures in network industries; Issues arising in the Visa dispute.

Argues that the semi-structural vector autoregression (VAR) approach is a fruitful method in investigating how monetary policy actions are transmitted through the economy. Limited-participation models as another realistic approach; Need to differentiate between bank lending and balance sheet channels of monetary policy.

Discusses the replication and scientific standards in applied economics after the periodical `Journal of Money, Credit and Banking' project in 1982-1984. Role of data in economic experiments; Attempt of the periodical to make authors' programs and data available to its readers; Appraisal of the data and the authors' methodology.

Responds to a commentary by William Brainard on the authors' article about the supply of money in the United States. Availability of research extensions; Development of an extended model; Distinction between variable profit functions.

This article explores non-custodial crypto asset mixers such as Tornado Cash. We analyze what types of mixers exist and how they work. We discuss opportunities and risks and offer an approach, based on voluntary disclosure, that would allow financial market regulators to combat money laundering and illicit activities, while allowing honest users to interact with privacy-enhancing protocols. We explain how crypto asset mixers play an important role on public blockchains and that privacy may be difficult to attain without them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the pandemic, there have been unprecedented increases in the cost of shipping goods accompanied by delays and backlogs at the ports. At the same time, import price inflation has reached levels unseen since the early 1980s. This has led many to speculate that the two trends are linked. In this article, we use new data on the price of shipping goods between countries to analyze the extent to which increases in the price of shipping can account for the rise in U.S. import price inflation. We find that the pass-through of shipping costs is small. Nevertheless, because the rise in shipping prices has been so extreme, it can account for between 3.60 and 5.87 percentage points per year of the increase in import price inflation during the post-pandemic period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debt crises in emerging markets have been linked to large fiscal deficits, high inflation rates, and large devaluations. This article studies a sovereign default model with domestic fiscal and monetary policies to understand Argentina's experience during the 2000s commodity boom (2005-2017), following the default of 2001. The model suggests that domestic policies played a critical role in Argentina's poor economic performance. Despite exceptionally favorable terms of trade, a rise in government spending led to higher taxation, inflation and currency depreciation, and lower output. Economic performance would have been worse had Argentina followed a strict, rather than accommodative, monetary policy without curbing its expansionary fiscal policy. Finally, limited access to international credit markets during this episode did not appear to play a significant role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors consider the following scenario: Two agents construct models of an endogenous price process. One agent thinks the data are stationary, the other thinks the data are nonstationary. A policymaker combines forecasts from the two models using a recursive Bayesian model averaging procedure. The actual (but unknown) price process depends on the policymaker's forecasts. The authors find that if the policymaker has complete faith in the stationary model, then beliefs and outcomes converge to the stationary rational expectations equilibrium. However, even a grain of doubt about stationarity will cause beliefs to settle on the nonstationary model, where prices experience large self-confirming deviations away from the stationary equilibrium. The authors show that it would take centuries of data before agents were able to detect their model misspecifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a standard competitive trade model, the authors show that the incidence of terrorism in different nations can affect the pattern of trade. Nations with a greater incidence of terrorism will export goods that are more immune to terrorism-related disruptions, while importing more terrorism-impacted goods. In addition, terrorism can be welfare augmenting for some nations because of terms-of-trade externalities. Finally, the authors present some qualitative conditions that identify when a nation's trade volume may rise (or fall) in response to a greater incidence of terrorism. Given the differential impact across nations, these trade and welfare results point to potential difficulties in international coordination of counterterrorism policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the Recovery Act) provided nearly $28 billion to state governments for improving U.S. highways, the highway system saw no significant improvement. For example, relative to the years before the act, the number of structurally deficient or functionally obsolete bridges was nearly unchanged, the number of workers on highway and bridge construction did not significantly increase, and the annual value of construction put in place for public highways barely budged. The author shows that as states spent Recovery Act highway grants, many simultaneously slashed their own contributions to highway infrastructure, freeing up state dollars for other uses. Next, using a cross-sectional analysis of state highway spending, the author shows that a state's receipt of Recovery Act highway dollars had no statistically significant causal impact on that state's total highway spending. Thus, the amount of actual highway infrastructure investment following the act's passage was likely very similar to that under a no-stimulus counterfactual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conditional on enrollment at a four-year public university, African American students are less likely to graduate and less likely to graduate with a STEM degree than White students. This article reports on evidence from Missouri showing that these outcome differences in college can be explained entirely by differences in students' academic preparation prior to college enrollment. While this result should not be taken to imply that college-level interventions cannot help to reduce observed college success gaps by race, it does point toward pre-college interventions as being better targeted at their underlying source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors study the internal organization of small business partnerships and focus on the number of owners and ownership structure and the dynamics of these variables. They find that partnerships tend to have a small number of owners with equal distribution of ownership shares. Moreover, while partnerships with equally distributed shares tend to keep this distribution constant, those with unequally distributed shares tend to move toward more equal distribution over time. The authors highlight that these facts are in line with the theory of private information in small business partnerships proposed by Espino, Kozlowski, and Sánchez (2014). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the evidence for duration dependence in job-finding rates and its implications for the unemployment duration distribution. The authors document duration dependence and show that it exists within nearly every demographic subgroup. Then, they examine the implications of duration dependence on unemployment duration, emphasizing that a uniform job-finding rate that does not incorporate duration dependence understates unemployment duration. Finally, they explore a composition-based approach to duration dependence, where they solve for the distribution of preexisting heterogeneity that is consistent with observed duration dependence. The authors look at how this distribution varies cyclically and, in particular, during the Great Recession. The largest changes occur at the low finding-rate tail of this distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses an endogenous growth model to study how the improvements in financing for innovative start-ups brought by venture capital (VC) affect firm innovation and growth. Partial equilibrium results show how lending contracts change as financing efficiency improves, while general equilibrium results show that better screening and development of projects by VC investors leads to higher aggregate productivity growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]