Economics: Research Guide

The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland regularly surveys a broad cross-section of businesses in the region it serves and convenes business advisory councils in eight of the region’s major metropolitan areas. The information collected through these surveys and conversations points to trends that are not yet apparent in the data and fills gaps in researchers’ understanding of our region’s economy. The information is helpful to Federal Reserve policymakers during their discussions about the nation’s monetary policy. Anecdotes herein have been edited for length and clarity.

This work addresses the challenges of implementing shared e-scooter services (SSS) in urban areas. Despite their potential for sustainable mobility, issues like road safety and street cluttering persist. Policy regulation is crucial, and recent efforts have focused on free-floating e-scooter parking legislation. To assist decision-making, this paper proposes an agent-based framework to design SSS parking supply and evaluate its impact. The methodology is applied in Lyon, France, where the SSS is gaining more and more territory. The main outcomes show parking regulation can introduce conflicting objectives, with a reduction of SSS use due to an increase in the access and egress walking distan..

This Data Brief updates the figures that appeared in “Urban and Regional Migration Estimates: Will Your City Recover from the Pandemic?” with data for 2023:Q4 for all series. Migration estimates enable us to track which urban neighborhoods and metro areas are returning to their old migration patterns and where the pandemic has permanently shifted migration trends.

This paper examines the role of mobilising political will in establishing the conditions necessary for economic and social inclusion of refugees, internally displaced persons, and formerly displaced persons who achieve durable solutions such as voluntary return. It investigates the role and conditions to mobilise political will for more comprehensive and inclusive policies that can lead to long-term local development in contexts of forced displacement in low- and middle-income countries (LICs and MICs). Case studies from Bangladesh, Cameroon, Ecuador, Iraq and Lebanon illustrate the ways in which political will, or its absence, can shape the approach to supporting the forcibly displaced and ..

We study how professional networks are related to immigrant labour market integration. Matched employer-employee data for Sweden show that networks grow with time in the host country and that their composition changes from immigrant toward native network members. A firm-dyadic analysis of re-employment of displaced workers suggests that conational connections have a much larger positive effect than native connections. However, the employment effect of native connections grows with years since migration. Furthermore, native connections tend to be associated with higher earnings and increased hires in connected local industries. After 20 years in Sweden, the built-up connections raise immigran..

The article provides cross-sectional evidence of domestic and international human migration associated with environmental shocks, with a specific emphasis on genderspecific heterogeneity and geographical distance. Both sudden and gradual environmental changes may influence the decision to migrate. However, the response is conditional to the cost and opportunity to move, which can vary based on gender and the distance between the location affected by the environmental shock and the hosting destination, within the country or internationally. Using the 5-year estimates of internal and international domestic migration flow disaggregated by sex, representative of the period 2005-2010, we estimate..

Anecdotal evidence suggests that co-location with an English Premier League (EPL) football team can boost university recruitment. But when a town or city loses its EPL team, it also loses some of the world’s attention. We test whether the EPL limelight does in fact affect university recruitment in England and Wales. We exploit the sharp annual cutoff between survival and relegation from the EPL, comparing the admissions outcomes of universities that have clear name association either side of that discontinuity. On average, losing association with an EPL team, for just one year after its relegation, significantly reduces a university’s undergraduate year-to-year admissions growt..

Difference-in-differences (DID) has long been a staple in estimating treatment effects in applied econometrics, with recent advancements relaxing traditional assumptions to explore heterogeneous and spillover effects. While heterogeneous effects analysis examines causal impacts across diverse groups and periods, spillover effects analysis delves into the influence of treatments on neighboring units. Incorporating spatial dependence within the DID framework, Spatial Difference-in-Differences (SDID) models have emerged as a powerful tool for analyzing such effects, particularly in settings where observations represent fixed geographical units. This study contributes to the literature by explic..

In the United States, less-educated parents tend to allocate little time to parentchild activities, reside in disadvantaged neighborhoods, and underestimate the relevance of parental inputs for later outcomes. This paper proposes a social learning mechanism that can lead to socioeconomic differences in parental beliefs and decisions. The key elements are young adults learning through the observations of older people within their neighborhood but being prone to erroneous inferences by imperfectly correcting for selection induced by residential segregation. I incorporate the social learning mechanism in a quantitative spatial and overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation and ..

This paper delves into geographical agglomeration patterns of economic activities focusing on the connection between these agglomeration tendencies and sectoral patterns of innovative activities. Within a broad evolutionary perspective, we refine upon incumbent statistical models, trying to distinguish between intra- and inter-sectoral agglomerative forces, conditional on different types of sectoral innovative activities. Utilizing data spanning three distinct years, a decade apart, we investigate the systematic nature of spatial distributions, the relationship between agglomeration drivers and technological paradigms, and shifts in agglomerative tendencies over time. Our findings suggest th..

In 2008, a powerful Colombian crime lord (Don Berna) was extradited to the United States. Homicides doubled in his stronghold of Medellin immediately following the extradition. We use variation in time generated by the pre- and post-extradition periods, and variation in space generated by areas of Medellin originally controlled by Don Berna to estimate the impact of the extradition on homicides. We then use the extradition as an instrument for homicides, and show that the wave of violence had downstream effects on education outcomes in the city. Homicide exposure led to a decrease in test scores, increased student dropout (driven by males and poorer students), and increased teacher turnover ..

Data on online job postings represents an important source of information for local labour markets. Many countries lack statistics on labour demand that are sufficiently up-to-date and disaggregated across regions, sectors and occupations. Web-scraped data from online job postings can provide further insights on the trends in labour demand and the skills needed across regions, sectors and occupations. This paper assesses the comparability and validity between Lightcast and other data sources for Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Sweden, for the years 2019 to 2022 across regions, sectors and occupations. It concludes with some recommen..

Several states in West Africa have experienced significant episodes of political violence since the early 2010s. These have included civil wars, religiously motivated terrorism, separatist insurgencies, military coups and communal strife, each of which have local, national and transnational dimensions. Intended to help guide responses to the region’s political challenges, the Sahel and West Africa Club (SWAC/OECD) created an interactive, spatial tool for policy makers in 2019, the Spatial Conflict Dynamics indicator (SCDi). The SCDi monitors political violence at subnational scales. It combines different quantitative dimensions of conflict into a mappable tool that describes the circumstan..

African armed conflicts involve a myriad of state forces, rebel groups and extremist organisations bound by rapidly changing alliances and rivalries. Organisations that were allies one day can fight each other the next and co-operate later still. The objective of this note is to update the pioneer work on conflict networks conducted by the OECD Sahel and West Africa Club (SWAC) in the region by using a formal approach to networks known as dynamic social network analysis. Leveraging a dataset of 3 800 actors and 60 000 violent events from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) from 1997-2023, the note monitors how the co-operative and rivalrous ties between violent actors ha..

This paper estimates the impact on children’s learning of one specific education technology (EdTech) intervention in Bangladesh: providing tablets with educational software, combined with private tutoring, to out-of-school students using a randomized control trial. The provision of tablets and tutors led to positive impacts on both the math and the Bangla language scores of out-of-school children, increasing math scores by approximately 0.25 standard deviations (SDs) of the distribution of test scores, and Bangla scores by approximately 0.17 SDs. The effects of the intervention were especially strong for girls compared to boys. Rural out-of-school children, but not urban out-of-school chil..

We evaluate the “Boost for Reading”, an in-service training program for teachers aimed at improving the teaching of literacy and boosting students’ reading and writing proficiency. The program provides research summaries about teaching strategies as a basis for group-based discussion, lesson preparations and evaluations under the supervision of a coach. The program was rolled out across Swedish compulsory schools in school years 2015/16–2017/18. We analyze the effects of the intervention using a staggered difference-in-differences strategy excluding treated schools as controls. We find that in lower secondary school, the program shifted the teaching towards a stronger focus on “rea..

We evaluate a non-targeted summer youth employment program (SYEP) for high school students aged 16-19 in Stockholm, Sweden, where public sector job offers were as good as randomly assigned. In contrast to previous studies evaluating SYEP that targeted groups with lower socioeconomic status, we find substantial labor market effects but no effects on education, crime, or health outcomes. However, income is negatively affected except during the program year. The penalty increases in absolute terms but does not change much in relative terms over time. The penalty is consistently statistically significant and large just after high school graduation but there are indications that the penalty atten..

Lawmakers created Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBs) as a government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) to support mortgage lending by the banks’ member institutions, which include commercial banks and insurance companies. This report describes the role of FHLBs in financial markets, their financial condition, the value of the federal subsidies they receive, and the risks they pose. CBO estimates that because of their GSE status, FHLBs will receive subsidies in fiscal year 2024 totaling $7.3 billion (the central estimate, with a plausible range of $5.7 billion to $8.9 billion).

In this paper, we evaluate students’ responses to labour market information by using eye-tracking technology to measure the visual attention students pay to labour market indicators of study programmes they are interested in. We relate these measures of visual attention to their recall of information and the likelihood that they re-rank their preferred study choice. In a sample of 63 students in the pre-academic track of a Dutch secondary school, we find that the dwell time (i.e., the time students spend looking at the labour market information we provide) is positively correlated with finding future changes of work and earnings prospects important. Students who report they find our inform..

This systematic review covers 56 studies that measure the effects of school closures on learning outcomes during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and 20 studies that evaluate the impact of measures to reduce learning loss. It restricts attention to evaluations with credible control groups and provides the first meta-analysis of learning losses that covers more developing countries (21) than developed ones (15). We find that a year of school closure is associated with learning loss equivalent to 1.1 years’ worth of learning and that school reopening mitigates these losses down to 0.5 years. With regard to measures to reduce learning loss, we find that tutoring delivered either in..

CBO compared the housing standards used to determine the military’s basic allowance for housing (BAH) with the housing units rented by comparable civilians. It also compared BAH rates with the rental costs paid by those civilians. The agency found that BAH rates for military personnel were typically higher than what similar civilians paid for rent and utilities. It also found that in high-cost areas in particular, comparable civilians often rented smaller housing units than the military housing standard.

Political armed conflict is responsible for thousands of fatalities every year. Facilitated by advancements in conflict event databases, research studies have moved towards predicting conflict and understanding its determinants subnationally. However, existing statistical and predictive models do not (fully) account for the diffusion and thus dependence of armed conflict across both time and space. As a result, predictive performance deteriorates, and predictors of interest are potentially biased. To address these shortcomings, this paper introduces a statistical regression model that captures both the spatial as well as temporal dimension of conflict diffusion, while its effects remain full..

This research examines the dynamics of commercial real estate prices in the Brazilian market, exploring the potential presence of speculative movements within the real estate market for the period 2012-2023. The study utilizes a conventional present value asset pricing model with a consistent discount factor and employs established bubble tests from the finance literature. These tests encompass assessments for explosive bubbles, periodic bubbles, multiple explosive bubbles and intrinsic bubbles. As a result, this approach allows us to diagnose unsustainable trends in the trajectory of real estate asset prices, should speculative bubbles be detected within the series. Utilizing data from the ..

Occupational mixes and wage distributions in the Fourth District’s metro areas mirror both national trends and departures from them that reflect the District’s unique economic makeup. Changes in occupational mix spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic were similar in District metro areas and the nation.

The study of agency has received increasing attention in recent years. The focus on change processes at the micro-level has brought new insights into the field of regional development. However, in debates about change and regional development, agents and leaders themselves have received far less attention than agency as a process. We provide an analytical model to show how political leaders and their leadership act as drivers of change through what we call actor properties (i.e., knowledge, networks and resources). We discuss how actor properties interact with the institutional context in which leaders operate and the various transitions from a political leader's legitimacy to the legacy of ..

This paper examines how immigration reshapes political landscapes, centring on the influx of immigrants from the EU's 2004 enlargement and its implications for the UK. I use a new variation in exposure to immigration based on migrant flows across various industries coupled with the employment structure in each region. Addressing potential concerns of endogeneity, I introduce a novel shift-share IV design, harnessing the industry-specific flow of migrants to regions outside the UK within the pre-2004 EU. The findings reveal a significant impact on support for the right-wing UK Independence Party and the Brexit Leave campaign, accompanied by a decline in Labour Party support. Moreover, the res..

Racial minorities, often sidelined by traditional financial systems, are a primary demographic for alternative financial services (AFS). While promoting financial inclusion is seen as a way to address racial disparities in the use of AFS, this claim is often complicated by selection and post-treatment biases. Drawing on data from the National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households (2015–2019) with over one hundred thousand households and adopting causal decomposition analysis, this study investigates the effect of bank account ownership on racial disparities in three AFS channels: payday lending, pawn shop loans, and check cashing. Results confirm that Black and Hispanic households ..

We study how exposure of employers to immigrants, both at the market and at the individual firm level, mitigates immigrant-native disparities. We use administrative employee-employer matched data from Portugal, which provides a unique setting given that it experienced almost no immigration until the early 2000s followed by substantial immigration waves. Focusing on the evolution of market wages across successive immigration cohorts, we find that increased employer exposure to immigrant groups can account for up to 25% of the wage convergence between immigrants and natives over the last two decades. We also document that individual-level exposure of firms to immigrants plays an important role..

This brief explores how shared micromobility (bikesharing and scooter sharing) has evolved since the pandemic. Primary data for this report were collected through four surveys: An Operator Survey (n=25) and an Agency Survey (n=52) distributed between January 2022 and May 2022 to all known shared micromobility operators and agencies and included questions about the attributes of shared micromobility systems1 operating within those agency jurisdictions and operator markets; and a similar Operator Survey (n=29) and an Agency Survey (n=52) distributed between January 2023 and June 2023 to all known shared micromobility operators and agencies.

We explore how rail transit’s first- and last-mile issue might be addressed by partnering with transportation network companies (TNCs) like Uber and Lyft. The goal is to lure high-income commuters to shift from cars to TNCs and rail. We also explore how rail and TNC partnerships can improve travel for low-income commuters who currently rely on low-frequency bus service. We parametrically test subsidizing TNC fares for feeder services in the San Francisco Bay Area in an idealized fashion. Inputs such as the residents’ value of time and vehicle ownership were taken from various local data sources. The communities that were selected for our study are served to different degrees by the BART ..