One of the most striking changes in the U.S. economy over the past 50 years has been the growth in the service sector. In 1950, 57 percent of workers were employed in the service sector, by 1970 that figure had risen to 63 percent and by 2000 to 75 percent. While service sector employment grew...

How do changes in market structure impact accessibility to credit? Following the introduction of publicly disclosed Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review stress tests, market shares of affected banks shrunk by about 2.1 pp. Impact significantly differs across regions, with shares dropping an...

This article develops and estimates a dynamic general equilibrium overlapping-generations model of career decisions. The model is fit to data on life cycle employment, schooling, and occupation decisions and on life cycle labor earnings, within and between cohorts observed in the United States...

Total household debt balances increased by $16 billion in the second quarter of 2023, according to the latest Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit from the New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data. This reflects a modest rise from the first quarter. Credit card balances saw the...

The Ramsey (1928) equation decomposes the real discount rate into the pure rate of time preference plus a term that accounts for the changing marginal utility of consumption. Discussions about the appropriate discount rate to apply in Cost Benefit Analysis sometimes refer to variations induced...

Studies continue to indicate that higher education is frequently a worthwhile investment for individuals and that it raises the productivity of the workforce as a whole. While the rising cost of post-secondary education has not eliminated this "college premium," it has raised new questions about...

We study how intermediaries-mortgage servicers-shaped the implementation of mortgage forbearance during the COVID-19 pandemic and use servicer-level variation to trace out the causal effect of forbearance on borrowers. Forbearance provision varied widely across servicers. Small servicers and...

Since the 2000s, economists across fields have increasingly used consumer credit reporting data for research. We introduce readers to the economics of and the institutional details of these data. Using examples from the literature, we provide practical guidance on how to use these data to...

In this article, we present a unified treatment of and explanation for the evolution of wages and employment in the US over the last 30 years. Specifically, we account for the pattern of changes in wage inequality, for the increased relative wage and employment of women, for the emergence of the...