Last October, Superstorm Sandy caused widespread destruction and massive disruptions to the regional economy, not to mention the lives of millions of residents. More than three months later, many people remain displaced, and some are still struggling to rebuild their homes, businesses, and lives. Despite these setbacks, the process of economic recovery in the region appears to be well underway, boosted by the beginning of the cleanup and restoration process. In this post, we take an initial look at the adverse impact Sandy has had on the region?s jobs, describing the nature and extent of the employment downturn and the subsequent rebound following the storm.

The New York metro region?s recovery from Superstorm Sandy is well under way. Spending on restoration and rebuilding activities following a natural disaster is a potentially powerful economic stimulus to the affected area. Indeed, money from outside the region?in the form of federal aid and private insurance payments?flowing to the damaged areas in the region gives a temporary boost to economic activity. But does this mean that Sandy?along with the federal aid and insurance payouts associated with it?was actually good for the region?s economy? In this post, we examine the nature and magnitude of the stimulus the New York metro region is receiving as it recovers from Sandy and provide some thoughts on how the economy may be affected over the longer term by rebuilding activities.

While the full extent of the harm caused by superstorm Sandy is still unknown, it?s clear that the region sustained significant damage and disruption, particularly along the coastal areas of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. As we describe earlier in this series, the economic costs associated with natural disasters are generally thought to arise from the damage and destruction of physical assets and the loss of economic activity. These costs can be substantial, running into the tens of billions, and impose significant stress on the affected communities. In this post, we assess who will ultimately pay the economic costs imposed by the storm. Based on data from recent hurricane events, it is likely that the federal government and private insurance companies will more than cover the aggregate costs. In the short run, though, there may be strains on state and local governments as well as on individuals and businesses as they await reimbursement.

Superstorm Sandy caused damage and disruption to a wide swath of the New York-New Jersey region. The high winds and storm surge resulted in significant physical damage to residential property, commercial real estate, and the power and transportation infrastructure. Everyday activities such as commuting, shopping, and traveling were impeded or in some cases prevented. As a number of communities across the region continue to cope with the damage and ongoing disruptions, there?s concern about if and when activity will return to normal.

Has Wall Street—the term for the securities industry that symbolizes New York City’s role as a global financial center—become less of a specialty for the city? In this post, we show that while the securities industry continues to play an outsized role in the New York City economy, the city’s job base has become somewhat more diversified since 1990. Diversification can be beneficial, as it makes a local economy less vulnerable to adverse shocks to its key industry. A recent example appears in a post by Bram and Orr showing that with Wall Street in a bit of a slump, nonfinancial industries have picked up the slack and are leading the city’s employment recovery this time around.

The ARRA stimulus package was designed to spur economic and employment growth in response to a deepening U.S. recession and the weakened fiscal conditions of many state governments. An analysis of the local allocation of ARRA funds shows that the $35 billion of stimulus spending in New York was relatively concentrated in expanded funding for Medicaid, while a large share of the $12 billion allocated to New Jersey went to extending unemployment insurance benefits. While ARRA funding supplemented tax revenues in both states in fiscal years 2010 and 2011, the program's spending components are winding down, and New York and New Jersey can no longer rely on these federal transfers when preparing their budgets.

The ARRA stimulus package was designed to spur economic and employment growth in response to a deepening U.S. recession and the weakened fiscal conditions of many state governments. An analysis of the local allocation of ARRA funds shows that the $35 billion of stimulus spending in New York was relatively concentrated in expanded funding for Medicaid, while a large share of the $12 billion allocated to New Jersey went to extending unemployment insurance benefits. While ARRA funding supplemented tax revenues in both states in fiscal years 2010 and 2011, the program's spending components are winding down, and New York and New Jersey can no longer rely on these federal transfers when preparing their budgets.

Unlike much of the nation, New York City has seen a robust rebound in employment since the recession. In early 2012, employment here reached 3.86 million, the largest number of jobs ever recorded. Yet the city’s unemployment rate has risen in recent months and is now 10 percent—its peak during the recession—and well above the 5 percent rate seen before the downturn. This lack of improvement reflects the fact that the number of employed residents of the city has not rebounded at all from its losses during the 2008-09 downturn. While commuters from outside the city have always been a part of the employment scene, particularly in Manhattan, the recent divergence between the brisk growth in jobs in the city and the lack of growth in the number of employed residents in the city is unprecedented. Moreover, this gap between the two measures continues to widen, raising some questions as to how strong New York City’s recovery actually is. In this post, we explore several alternative explanations for the lack of growth in the employment of city residents in the face of a sharp recovery and expansion of jobs. While there are several potential explanations, the stagnation of resident employment remains largely a puzzle.

In 2008, as the financial crisis unfolded and the U.S. economy tumbled into a sharp recession, the outlook for the tri-state region (New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut) and especially New York City—the heart of the nation's financial industry—looked grim. Regional economists feared an economic downturn as harsh as the one in 2001, or the even deeper recession of the early 1990s. Now, as the recovery takes hold, we can report that although the economic downturn was severe in the region, with the unemployment rate surging above 9 percent in many places, it was less severe than many had anticipated. This post—which is based on the New York Fed’s May 6 Regional Economic Press Briefing—recaps how the Great Recession affected employment across the region, how the ensuing recovery has progressed, and what the prospects are for job growth as we go forward.

In an environment of high foreclosure rates and distressed housing markets, federal policies are focusing on loan modifications to help delinquent homeowners pay their mortgages. While it is too soon to assess the effectiveness of these modifications, policymakers considering future refinements may gain insight from a more established, state-level enterprise that takes an alternative approach to mortgage relief. The Pennsylvania Homeowners’ Emergency Mortgage Assistance Program provides temporary income support to homeowners unable to pay their mortgage during a spell of unemployment. The program has helped most participants retain their homes while paying off their loans—at a potentially lower cost than that of other relief initiatives.

After bottoming out in late 2009, New York City’s economy has been on the road to recovery. In this post, we call attention to an unprecedented feature of the current economic recovery: overall employment in the city began to rebound from the recession well before Wall Street started adding jobs. We also consider some questions that this development naturally raises: What took Wall Street employment so long to recover? What’s been driving job generation on Main Street? What does the recent pickup in Wall Street employment suggest about the outlook for the city’s economy?

Subprime mortgage lending expanded in New York City between 2004 and mid-2007, and delinquencies on these subprime loans have been rising sharply. We use a rich, loan-level data set of the city's outstanding subprime loans as of January 2009 to describe the main features of this lending and to model the performance of these loans. These subprime loans represent a smaller share of total housing units in the city than is true nationwide. In addition, they are found to be clustered in neighborhoods where average borrower credit quality is low and, unlike prime mortgage loans, where African-Americans and Hispanics constitute relatively large shares of the population. We estimate a model of the likelihood that these loans will become seriously delinquent and find a significant role for credit quality of borrowers, debt-to-income and loan-to-value ratios at the time of loan origination, and estimates of the loss of home equity.

We review our earlier studies that estimated the overall economic cost of the 9-11 attacks on New York City. Since the attack took place during a national and local recession, we emphasize the importance of controlling for economic conditions to obtain a precise estimate of the attack's effects. First, we estimate the physical capital loss, based on the cost required to clean up the site and repair and replace the destroyed and damaged infrastructure. The estimated foregone lifetime earnings of the workers killed in the attack are used to gauge the loss of human capital. The total physical capital loss was estimated to be $21.6 billion and the lifetime earnings loss was estimated to be $7.8 billion, yielding a total estimated loss of $29.4 billion ($2001). We provide estimates of the disruptive effect on employment and earnings by comparing the actual path of employment following the attack with a counter-factual path constructed from an auto-regressive model that predicts trends in NYC private-sector employment. We find a net job shortfall of roughly 65,000 jobs immediately after the attack, converging to near zero by the end of 2002. Over this period it is estimated that wage and salary income was roughly $6 billion ($2006) lower than it would have been if the attack had not occurred. In addition to these short run costs, we also investigate the extent to which the attack may have adversely affected the city's longer-term economic growth potential by examining real estate markets. With the possible exception of downtown commercial real estate, we find little evidence that perceptions of the city as a place to live or do business were adversely affected by the attack.

The New York-New Jersey region entered a pronounced downturn in 2008, but the pace of decline eased considerably in spring 2009 and then leveled off in July, according to three key Federal Reserve Bank of New York economic indexes. These developments, in conjunction with a growing consensus that the national economy is headed for recovery, suggest that the worst may be over for the region's economy. However, a downsizing of the area's critical finance sector could pose a major risk to the economic outlook going forward--particularly for New York City.

The price of vacant land in an urban area is a fundamental indicator of an area’s attractiveness. However, because the value of vacant land is hard to measure, indirect methods are typically used to gauge prices. A more direct approach to measuring land prices, using a unique data set, reveals that the price of unimproved land in the New York area is high, and rose sharply from 1999 to 2006. The rising trend suggests the underlying strength of the area’s economy and the increasing value of the area’s productivity and amenities. Current Issues

The 2007 slowing in job growth in the New York - New Jersey region continued through August 2008. A projected weakening in the national economy through the end of 2008 combined with the market turmoil affecting New York City's finance sector suggests that the region will post substantially smaller job gains this year than it did in 2007. Beyond 2008, continued financial stress could lead to an even sharper and more protracted contraction in the city's finance sector, potentially spreading to other sectors of the region's economy.

The author analyzes the industrial restructuring process in the New York metropolitan area in the first half of the 1990s. To measure the extent of restructuring, he reviews estimates of permanent job losses of metropolitan workers, mass layoff announcements in the region, and net job changes by industry. The analysis shows that a significant part of the area's recent restructuring reflects a continuation of the long-term trend away from manufacturing toward a service-oriented economy. This shift, while broadly in line with nationwide trends, has been somewhat more intense in the metropolitan area. Downsizings also hit a number of the area's nonmanufacturing sectors, including government, transportation, and public utilities.

An analysis of upstate New York's foreign-born residents suggests that they contribute to the region's human capital in important ways. This population boasts a greater concentration of college graduates than either the region's native-born population or immigrants downstate. While some immigrants upstate may compete with U.S.-born workers for jobs, the more highly educated appear to be entering skilled occupations - in medicine, science, and research particularly - that complement those of native-born residents.

The New York-New Jersey region's hard-earned recovery in employment is being overshadowed by ongoing job losses in certain sectors and the prospect of moderating growth in the United States as a whole. Fortunately, several positive trends are bolstering the region's employment picture. Strength in the services sector, a falloff in restructuring, and gains in income point to continuing—though modest—regional job growth in 1996.

The pattern of employment recovery in the New York-New Jersey region is expected to remain unbroken in 1998, despite a slight slowing of job growth.