The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, commonly known as the Boston Fed, is responsible for the First District of the Federal Reserve, which covers New England: Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont and all of Connecticut except Fairfield County. It has been headquartered since 1977 in the distinctive 614-foot (187 m) tall, 32-story Federal Reserve Bank Building at 600 Atlantic Avenue, Boston. Designed by architecture firm Hugh Stubbins & Associates, the tower portion of the building is suspended between two towers on either side. From 1922 to 1977, the bank's headquarters were located at 250 Franklin Street, currently occupied by the Langham Hotel Boston.The code of the Bank is A1, meaning that dollar bills from this Bank will have the letter A on them. Its current president (interim) is Kenneth C. Montgomery, who replaced Eric S. Rosengren in October 2021. The Boston Fed has engaged a search committee to choose a more permanent replacement for Rosengren. The Boston Fed describes its mission as promoting "growth and financial stability in New England and the nation". The Boston Fed also includes the New England Public Policy Center.This building was designated a Boston Landmark by the Boston Landmarks Commission in 1978..
This paper examines how the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) supported employment during the COVID-19 period by distinguishing between its short-term liquidity and broader funding effects. Using county-level data, we show that delays in loan disbursement had prolonged negative impacts only on the smallest urban businesses. To identify the causal impact of funding itself, we develop an instrument based on the pre-pandemic payroll share in small establishments. Instrumental-variable and firm-level analyses reveal that PPP funding improved business survival and employment recovery substantially and broadly, with an estimated cost of roughly $89,000 per job-year, consistent with other large-scale fiscal interventions.
We revisit the evolution of the relationship between mortgage debt and income, adding to the growing literature that extends beyond the 2000s housing boom. Our analysis reveals a permanent decline in the correlation between purchase mortgage amounts and borrower incomes that occurred in the 1990s and was largely complete before the 2000s housing boom. We attribute the decline in the debt-income correlation to a transition in underwriting practices, as lenders moved from human judgment to data-driven statistical models of mortgage default that better identified risky borrowers and enabled broader access to mortgage credit. Using a simple model, we show that patterns observed in the 1990s, including slow price growth and large increases in homeownership, are consistent with a substantial expansion of credit to lower-income households.
Intermediate macroeconomics is a core course in the undergraduate economics curriculum that offers a unique set of challenges for the instructor. This article introduces a symposium on the course that outlines these challenges and suggests ways to address some of them. The symposium begins with results from a national survey of intermediate macro instructors at U.S. institutions that documents current course structures, content, and instructor perspectives. Three additional papers propose specific approaches to issues that intermediate macro instructors typically face: whether to align the course more closely with the research frontier, how to teach contemporary Federal Reserve monetary policy implementation, and how to expand the coverage of growth theory beyond the standard Solow Model. By documenting current practice and offering specific approaches to course design, the symposium contributes to ongoing discussions about the purpose, scope, and future direction of intermediate macro in undergraduate economics programs.
Do firms adjust prices to realized costs, expected costs, or both? We address this question using a new survey of U.S. businesses that separately measures realized cost changes since the last price adjustment and expected cost changes over the subsequent year, including portions attributable to 2025 trade policies. Using perceived tariff exposure as an instrument, we identify the causal effects of realized and expected costs on prices. Reset prices incorporate almost 70 percent of current costs and nearly 45 percent of expected costs over the next year. The importance of these channels varies significantly across firms. Frequent price adjusters respond mainly to current costs, while sticky-price firms weight expectations more heavily. Goods producers adjust contemporaneously, whereas service firms are more forward looking, as are firms with a high labor share or facing high trade uncertainty. This evidence favors endogenous pricing frameworks in which uncertainty reshapes the reset-price kernel across horizons or imperfect-information models in which uncertainty amplifies the role of expectations over standard time-dependent models.
In light of recent interest in “generational wealth” and its potential to close racial disparities in wealth, this paper revisits an older literature with updated and improved data and methods. Relative to past research, this paper uses more recent data (through 2019) that includes a wider range of retirement assets and recovers intergenerational transfers not reflected in prior research. Despite these innovations, our findings are consistent with earlier research that intergenerational transfers can account for a relatively small share of the racial disparities in wealth that we observe in the data.
