That's Interesting
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Recent COVID-19 Spike and U.S. Employment Slowdown
05th August, 2020The coronavirus pandemic continues to affect employment across the United States. In a previous blog post, we explored the idea of forecasting weekly changes in employment using data from Homebase, a data set that reports changes in employment daily. In this article, we discuss our updated forecasts for employment using this technique and investigate whether the recent changes in the labor market are related to the spike in COVID-19 cases across the country since June.
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FRBSF – The Fog of Numbers
20th July, 2020In times of economic turbulence, revisions to GDP data can be sizable, which makes conducting economic policy in real time during a crisis more difficult. A simple model based on Okun’s law can help refine the advance data release of real GDP growth to provide an improved reading of economic activity in real time.
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FRBSF – The Rising Cost of Climate Change: Evidence from the Bond Market
20th July, 2020The level of the social discount rate (SDR) is a crucial factor for evaluating the costs of climate change. This paper demonstrates that the equilibrium or steady-state real interest rate is the fundamental anchor for market-based SDRs.
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An Unemployment Crisis after the Onset of COVID-19
27th May, 2020The COVID-19 pandemic has upended the U.S. labor market, with massive job losses and a spike in unemployment to its highest level since the Great Depression. How long unemployment will remain at crisis levels is highly uncertain and will depend on the speed and success of coronavirus containment measures.
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Coronavirus could force China to rein in Belt and Road ambitions
06th May, 2020Domestic economic challenges due to COVID-19 are likely to force China to dial back on big-ticket infrastructure projects. But Beijing will not shy away from bankrolling virus-hit countries to score geopolitical gains.
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