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Research Spotlight

Data Revisions and Pandemic-Era Excess Savings

Posted November 8, 2023

U.S. household savings rose and fell at unprecedented rates since the onset of the pandemic recession. Comprehensive data revisions by the Bureau of Economic Analysis show that households continue to hold significantly more savings than previously estimated. Our updated estimates suggest that more than $400 billion of accumulated excess savings remains in the aggregate economy, and those funds are likely to continue being drawn down into the first half of 2024.

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Recent Publications

FedViews

Posted November 30, 2023

Robert G. Valletta, associate director of research and senior vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, stated his views on the current economy and the outlook as of November 30, 2023.

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Economic Letter

Posted November 27, 2023
Miguel Faria-e-Castro, Pascal Paul, and Juan M. Sánchez

Concerns emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic over banks continuing to lend to unproductive businesses that were close to default. Recent research shows that lenders have incentives to offer relatively better terms to less-productive and more-indebted firms to recover their prior investments. U.S. loan-level data confirm the empirical relevance of such lending behavior. A rich model of firms and banks further emphasizes that this type of lending can also depress overall productivity by sustaining firms that should otherwise exit the economy.

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Working Paper

Posted November 1, 2023
Joan Monras, Eduardo Polo-Muro, and Javier Vazquez-Grenno

This paper studies how fertility decisions respond to an improvement in job stability using variation from the large and unexpected regularization of undocumented immigrants in Spain implemented during the first half of 2005. This policy change improved substantially the labor market opportunities of affected men and women, many of which left the informality of house keeping service sectors toward more formal, stable, and higher paying jobs in larger firms (Elias et al., 2023). In this paper, we estimate the effects of the regularization on fertility rates using two alternative difference-in-differences strategies that compare fertility behavior of “eligible” and “non-eligible” candidate women to obtain the legal status, both on aggregate and at the local level. Our findings suggests that gaining work permits leads to a significant increase in women fertility. Our preferred estimates indicate that the regularization increased fertility rates among affected women by around 5 points, which is a 10 percent increase.

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Indicators and Data

China Cyclical Activity Tracker

The China Cyclical Activity Tracker, China CAT, is an alternative measure of China's economic growth based on research in Fernald, Hsu, and Spiegel (2019).

Cyclical and Acyclical Core PCE Inflation

Cyclical and Acyclical Core PCE Inflation divides components of core personal consumption expenditures according to whether they move in tandem with economic cycles or are independent of the state of the overall economy.

Daily News Sentiment Index

The Daily News Sentiment Index is a high frequency measure of U.S. economic sentiment based on lexical analysis of economics-related news articles.

Pandemic-Era Excess Savings

Pandemic-Era Excess Savings updates estimates of the remaining stock of aggregate excess savings in the U.S. economy, defined as the difference between actual savings and the pre-pandemic trend.

PCE Inflation Dispersion

PCE Inflation Dispersion statistics present a more detailed summary of the personal consumption expenditure price index (PCEPI), a measure of U.S. inflation. Included are measures of the distribution of price changes across categories and diffusion indices.

Proxy Funds Rate

The Proxy Funds Rate uses a broad set of financial market indicators to assess the stance of monetary policy. The proxy rate can be interpreted as indicating what federal funds rate would typically be associated with prevailing financial market conditions if the federal funds rate were the only monetary policy tool being used.

SF Fed Data Explorer

The SF Fed Data Explorer is an interactive tool that gives users the ability to explore, analyze, and download detailed data for various groups of people in the U.S. labor market. The data come from responses to the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS).

Supply- and Demand-Driven PCE Inflation

Supply- versus Demand-Driven PCE Inflation determines the monthly contributions to both headline and core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) inflation from supply-driven versus demand-driven components.

Total Factor Productivity

Total Factor Productivity (TFP) presents a real-time, quarterly data series for the U.S. business sector, adjusted for variations in factor utilization—labor effort and capital's workweek.

Treasury Yield Premiums

The Treasury yield premium model decomposes nominal bond yields of various maturities into three components: expectations of the average future short-term interest rate, a term premium, and a model residual.

Weather-Adjusted Employment Change

This page provides estimates of weather-adjusted employment change in the United States for the past six months. The estimates are aggregated from county-level estimates of weather's employment effects, which were derived from a county-level analysis of the short-run effects of unusual weather on employment growth.

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Our interactive tool gives you the ability to explore, analyze, and download detailed data for various groups of people in the U.S. labor market.

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The Center for Pacific Basin Studies promotes cooperation among central banks in the Pacific Basin and provides insight into and analysis of economic policy issues affecting the region.

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