U.S. labor market slack created by COVID-19 pandemic has been absorbed
The weaker-than-expected August labor market report should not obscure the labor market’s ongoing and significant progress while recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic.
October 07, 2021
Southwest Economy, Third Quarter 2021
Technology displaced workers in pandemic; retraining must expand
Tamar Jacoby, president of Opportunity America, discusses the pandemic, worker mobility and job training.
September 30, 2021
Supply-chain woes, labor shortages and COVID-19 slow resilient Texas economy
Regional economic growth has slowed, though it remains robust by historical standards. While demand has improved from year-ago levels, supply-chain disruptions and labor shortages have limited output growth and pushed up wages and prices.
September 30, 2021
Spanish-Speaking Growth in Texas Reinforces Need to Close Education Gaps
The Eleventh Federal Reserve District has the second-largest native Spanish-language population in the Federal Reserve System. That population will grow further as the number of Hispanics exceeds 20 million in Texas alone by 2050.
August 03, 2021
Se habla Español: U.S. yet to realize many benefits of a growing bilingual population
The Spanish-only-speaking population in the U.S. faces many challenges that include overcoming often lesser income prospects compared with monolingual English speakers.
July 13, 2021
How much slack is left in the labor market?
Our analysis shows that viewing the level of employment through the lens of the employment-to-population ratio does not indicate considerable slack in the labor market.
July 06, 2021
What the trimmed mean says about future inflation: broadening price pressures ahead
As we look ahead to the rest of this year and into 2022, we expect that even as some of the extreme price increases responsible for the recent surge in headline inflation fade, a broader swath of goods and services will show meaningful price increases.
July 01, 2021
The Paycheck Protection Program: Conditional Success or Unconditional Failure?
The Paycheck Protection Program, a key provision of the CARES Act, sought to stabilize small business finances and maintain employment.
June 22, 2021
Southwest Economy, Second Quarter 2021
Federal COVID-19 relief aided consumer debt, though immigrant Texans derived less benefit
The prevalence of various federal-level assistance programs helped U.S. and Texas residents shore up their household finances during the COVID-19 recession. Among mostly immigrant groups, this tendency was less pronounced, likely due to legal and socioeconomic barriers.
June 18, 2021
Southwest Economy, Second Quarter 2021
Women took brunt of pandemic job loss as priorities shifted to home
Working women fared worse than men in the pandemic—a reversal from the Great Recession.
June 18, 2021