Immigration has been one key driver of labor market dynamics in the post-pandemic U.S. economy. Yet the terms used for different categories of immigrants may be unfamiliar to many who are interested in U.S. labor market developments. We provide a taxonomy of the categories of immigration flows, and describe what has happened over the past couple of years in terms of these categories.
Life insurers have significant exposure to commercial real estate primarily through direct mortgage lending and commercial mortgage-backed securities. Recent developments in the CRE market, such as the shift to more people working from home following the Covid-19 pandemic resulting in lower demand for office space, as well as higher interest rates, have put pressure on commercial property values. In this article, we provide a comprehensive and detailed analysis of life insurers’ CRE exposures and their implications for financial stability.
Asian Americans faced a disproportionately larger surge in unemployment rates than other racial and ethnic groups during the Covid-19 pandemic. While existing literature typically examines labor demand channels to explain this, we instead explore a labor supply channel. Our hypothesis is that Asian Americans are more cautious about Covid-19 infections and thus more selective about job opportunities, contributing to their higher unemployment rate than other groups. Analysis of cellphone data during the pandemic indicates that non-work mobility significantly decreased in areas with larger Asian populations, supporting our hypothesis.
Life insurance policies are fairly common financial products in the United States.As of 2022, 46% of households held term life insurance and 17% of households held cash value policies with an average cash value of $55,000. 2 Many insurance products are covered by state insurance guaranty associations.These guaranty associations provide a partial guarantee to insurance policyholders that they will continue to have their claims paid in the event that their insurer is declared insolvent.While this may bring to mind guarantees for bank deposits, the life insurance guaranty system differs in a number of important ways from deposit insurance provided by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).If you open a bank account in the United States, you probably know that were the bank to run into trouble, your deposits would be guaranteed by the FDIC up to a prespecified limit (currently, $250,000).But what would happen if your life insurer were to run into trouble?The rules-as well as the process-for getting insurance policies honored (up to state limits) are different than those for getting back your bank deposits.This article discusses how the insurance guaranty process works in the context of considering the ways in which state insurance guaranty associations and insurance commissioners might respond to an insolvency of a large life insurer. 3 Large life insurers are complicated organizations.Many of the largest U.S. life insurance companies are part of corporate groups that may be based domestically or abroad.In the United States, insurers are regulated mainly at the company level by the insurance commissioner of the state in which the company is domiciled (which I refer to as the company's home state).However, an insurance company's policyholders may be spread across the country.What protections do policyholders have when an insurer runs into trouble?Coverage limits depend on the type of insurance product.For example, individual annuities are typically covered up to $250,000.If an individual had a fixed annuity life insurance policy that was paying out $400 per month with a present value of all future payments of $400,000, then they could expect to receive $250 per month based on the present value of $250,000 that was covered by the guaranty fund.Limits for most other products are similar.However, the limits vary from state to state and product to product.If the insurer runs out of money and is unable to honor a policy, then the state guaranty association of the state in which the policyholder resides provides the coverage. 4 In practice, as illustrated by the two largest insurer insolvencies that I discuss as examples-namely, the Penn Treaty and Executive Life insolvencies-the resolution process can involve delays that deplete assets, introduce uncertainty regarding the degree of coverage for policyholders, and cause inequity across the coverage provided to different types of policies.
In this article, I examine the period following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic as a case study of how monetary policy affects the stock market. I decompose equity price movements between early 2020 and early 2022 into changes in expected cash flows, risk-free rates at which dividends are discounted, and a residual component containing risk premiums. I find that Federal Reserve policy actions had significant effects on stock prices through all three channels during the first two years of the pandemic. These effects dissipated and then reversed as the policy tightening of March 2022 approached.
Since the start of the pandemic the U.S. labor market has been characterized as being plagued by missing jobs , i.e. payroll employment has fallen more than five million jobs short of its pre-pandemic trend, and missing workers , i.e. the participation rate has declined by 1.2 percentage points: A pandemic-induced shortage of workers has restrained job creation and, as a result, been a substantial drag on post-pandemic job growth. In this paper, we show that this is a misinterpretation of the data for two reasons. The first is that the number of missing jobs is inflated because it is based on the unrealistic assumption that the pre-pandemic tailwinds for job growth from the decline in the unemployment rate and cyclical upward pressures on participation would have continued in 2020 and beyond if the pandemic would not have occurred. Second, the number of workers missing due to COVID is overstated because the bulk of the 1.2 percentage-point decline in the participation rate since the start of the pandemic reflects a continuation of its long-run downward trend that was already part of projections before the pandemic broke out. Instead, our payroll jobs accounting yields a 810 thousand cyclical shortfall in payroll jobs in October 2022 compared to right before the pandemic. At the recent pace of job growth, even without monetary and fiscal tightening, we expect a substantial deceleration of payroll growth in the coming months.
Forecasting inflation accurately is critical for making many policy decisions. A key modeling choice that economists and policymakers face when forecasting inflation is whether to forecast aggregate inflation directly or its individual components first and then aggregate the results. Another important modeling decision is whether or not to group certain components (for instance, core and noncore components1) and then model them separately. In this article, we present a new disaggregated approach to forecasting inflation. Our focus is on inflation as measured by the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) Price Index from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). We developed this new approach primarily because of the widespread heterogeneity evident in the dynamics of inflation both across its components and over time. In what follows, we begin by documenting this heterogeneity in PCE inflation. We then discuss the BEA data we used in our research and explain our method for microforecasting inflation in the PCE components—which we subsequently aggregate to derive a total PCE inflation forecast. Finally, we compare the forecasting accuracy of our novel approach and other methods, including those that forecast aggregate inflation directly. We find that over our sample period and other subperiods, the forecasts produced by our method are more accurate than those produced by the alternative approaches considered here.
在数字经济时代,算法技术结合大数据和机器学习后已被应用于自动化或辅助决策、精准匹配和趋势预测等诸多生产或管理活动中.伴随其在商业和公共管理等领域的广泛深刻运用,因算法权利异化导致的算法滥用问题逐渐受到人们的担忧和重视.算法滥用存在针对不同主体的诸多现实或潜在的危害与弊端,足以影响到数字经济的健康可持续发展.因此,数字经济时代引致出针对算法进行规制和监管的需求.不同于传统的规制和监管的范式与手段,针对算法进行规制监管存在诸多问题与挑战.通过分析当前典型的算法规制思路与治理范式,结合算法规制监管的实施特点和痛点难点,本文针对性地提出建立以广义算法公开为基础的分场景算法审查、监管和评议的综合技术规制框架;建立在算法伦理基础上的外部监管问责、平台责任义务相结合的法规体系;建立以个体数据赋权为主要形式的健全维权途径、强化维权意识和配置个人算法权利的数据主体算法权利保障;建立算法设计主体价值与算法相关主体价值收敛协同发展、强化算法设计者社会责任的具体实现路径,以图探求适合中国数字经济背景下的算法规制体系建设思路.
2022年,在疫情多发散发、俄乌冲突、极端天气等超预期因素冲击下,我国经济下行压力加大.2022年我国经济实现3.0％的增长实属不易.本文运用统计指标和统计数据从生产、需求、收入、价格四个角度对2022年经济运行的基本特点进行提炼与分析,概括当前经济发展面临的主要挑战和有利条件,并对2023年的经济发展形势进行展望.初步判断,2023年我国GDP增速预计在5.5％～6.0％.
State and federal highways are currently funded by a combination of motor fuel taxes (MFTs), general fund transfers, fees, tolls, property taxes, and bond revenues. Of these, state fuel and vehicle taxes comprised 26% of revenues used for U.S. highways, and federal fuel and vehicle taxes made up 15% in 2021, according to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation. The MFT share of funding is declining due to increasing overall fuel economy trends, inflation (since many MFTs—including the federal MFT—are assessed in cents per gallon and not indexed), and recent vehicle miles traveled (VMT) trends—especially during the 2020–21 pandemic years, which saw lower passenger and freight travel. Electric vehicles (EVs) have the potential not only to accelerate the fuel efficiency of vehicles in use, but also to lead to a sizable population of individual road users who pay no fuel taxes. A recent study estimated that EVs reduce gas tax revenues by $250 million a year (Davis and Sallee, 2019).
As the debt ceiling episode unfolds, we highlight a sharp increase in activity across the U.S. credit default swaps (CDS) market and infer the likelihood of a U.S. default from these market prices. Beginning in January 2023, we document a significant increase in U.S. CDS trading activity and positions, accompanied by a spike in CDS premiums. We estimate an increase in the market-implied default probability from about 0.2–0.3% in 2022, to approximately 1% in 2023. Yet, this default probability currently remains lower than what we find for the periods leading up to the 2011 and 2013 debt ceiling episodes, due in part to the cheapening of deliverable Treasury collateral to CDS contracts.
产权是人类社会迄今各种经济制度安排的基础,也是社会主义市场经济制度的基石.本文对现有的关于产权起源的先占先得说、劳动赋予说和禀赋效应说进行了梳理和剖析,指出先占先得和劳动赋予描述了占有形成的时间和物理状态,是产权形成的前提,但占有转化为产权还需得到他人和社会的承认和尊重,从而不被抢夺和侵害.禀赋效应说提供了关于产权在冲突中产生的有启发性的新思路,但其依赖于占有者主观高估占有物、取得演化优势的强假定.本文提出,早期人类社会的产权不是起源于两个孤立的个人之间的领地之争,而是在共同生产生活的小群体社会内分配产出物时自然生成的.本文构建的演化博弈模型证明了,早期人类小群体社会中个体基于自我求生保全和繁衍的本能防卫需要,以及群体内的信息交流与信号效应,会遏制抢夺和侵犯对自然产权的冲击,从而演化出产权的初始和自然形态.本文对重新认识产权在人类社会起源中的作用及其演变具有创新性和启发性.
生育政策调整与女性就业的关系是当前社会普遍关心的问题.本文基于2015年全国1％人口抽样调查数据,利用单独二孩政策的外生冲击,评估单独二孩政策对女性劳动参与的影响,实证检验生育多孩与女性就业的关系.本文研究发现:(1)单独二孩政策使单独夫妇生育二孩的概率显著增加2.3％,但政策效应主要集中于34～39岁和高学历女性群体.(2)单独二孩政策并未显著降低政策目标女性的劳动参与,结果具有较好的稳健性,也不存在年龄和学历上的异质性.(3)相比于非独生子女夫妇,单独夫妇与父母公婆同住的比例明显更高,这可能是政策未显著降低单独女性劳动参与的原因.此外,幼儿园等公共照护资源供给与祖辈同住存在互补效应,因而也能抵消生育对女性就业的负向冲击.本文的研究表明,生育二孩并不必然抑制女性劳动参与.但要实现女性生育与就业的协调,需要有可替代的家庭和公共儿童照护资源做支撑.
