July 16, 2020

Shirin Amini was chatting on the phone with her niece, a third-year college student, and trying to keep up.

“My friend is asexual,” her niece was explaining, “and she’s demiromantic.”

“I was like, ‘What are you talking about?'” recalls Shirin, accounting manager in the San Francisco Fed’s Financial Management Division. “I have no idea.”

The language of love, it seems, is getting more complicated.

Shirin, who is gay and grew up in the 80s and 90s, realized that despite her decades of speaking out for LGBTQ+ rights, she wasn’t up to date on current discussions within the community. And if she’s confused, what about folks who aren’t part of the community?

For Shirin and Chris Wong, co-leaders of the San Francisco Fed’s 12LGBTQF employee resource group (ERG), the Fed is a space to encourage conversations and understanding about issues for both LGBTQ+ people and allies, in order to bring about a more empathetic...

July 16, 2020

Shirin Amini was chatting on the phone with her niece, a third-year college student, and trying to keep up.

“My friend is asexual,” her niece was explaining, “and she’s demiromantic.”

“I was like, ‘What are you talking about?'” recalls Shirin, accounting manager in the San Francisco Fed’s Financial Management Division. “I have no idea.”

The language of love, it seems, is getting more complicated.

Shirin, who is gay and grew up in the 80s and 90s, realized that despite her decades of speaking out for LGBTQ+ rights, she wasn’t up to date on current discussions within the community. And if she’s confused, what about folks who aren’t part of the community?

For Shirin and Chris Wong, co-leaders of the San Francisco Fed’s 12LGBTQF employee resource group (ERG), the Fed is a space to encourage conversations and understanding about issues for both LGBTQ+ people and allies, in order to bring about a more empathetic...

July 23, 2020

The Federal Reserve Board of Governors is touring the country to talk with banks working with financial technology and fintech firms. Through a lot of open discussion, the Fed wants to get an accurate, well-rounded picture of emerging technologies as well as challenges facing the industry.

The Board and San Francisco Fed are co-hosting exclusive office hours for three days only. Here’s how you can get involved.

July 16, 2020

Shirin Amini was chatting on the phone with her niece, a third-year college student, and trying to keep up.

“My friend is asexual,” her niece was explaining, “and she’s demiromantic.”

“I was like, ‘What are you talking about?'” recalls Shirin, accounting manager in the San Francisco Fed’s Financial Management Division. “I have no idea.”

The language of love, it seems, is getting more complicated.

Shirin, who is gay and grew up in the 80s and 90s, realized that despite her decades of speaking out for LGBTQ+ rights, she wasn’t up to date on current discussions within the community. And if she’s confused, what about folks who aren’t part of the community?

For Shirin and Chris Wong, co-leaders of the San Francisco Fed’s 12LGBTQF employee resource group (ERG), the Fed is a space to encourage conversations and understanding about issues for both LGBTQ+ people and allies, in order to bring about a more empathetic...

The Federal Reserve's community development function promotes the economic resilience and mobility of low- to moderate-income and underserved households and communities across the country. The spread of COVID-19 is having an impact on communities nationwide. To best respond to this crisis, information is needed about the scope and scale of the pandemic’s challenges. Throughout 2020, all 12 Reserve Banks and the Fed Board of Governors are surveying representatives of nonprofit organizations, financial institutions, government agencies, and other community organizations to understand the effects of COVID-19 on low- to moderate-income communities and the entities serving them. The results of each survey will be released as a downloadable report.

June 3, 2020

The global COVID-19 pandemic brought extraordinary disruption in every aspect of our lives. Still, the private and public sectors can come together to create new systems that can make the United States more resilient.

From digital contact tracing to mobile apps that track coronavirus symptoms, technology can help individuals, communities, and governments respond to the pandemic. But how is this information collected and stored? What’s made available to the public? How much is truly anonymous? What are your rights around this data?

In early 2019, the San Francisco Fed fintech team began engaging in research to understand the complexity of data as a policy area, so we have these questions, too.

We hope this work can help the U.S. navigate the use of data during the pandemic while offering considerations for potential systems of data rights and data protection in the future.

June 30, 2020

By Bina Patel Shrimali and Jackelyn Hwang

As housing has become increasingly unaffordable in the Bay Area, anecdotal accounts abound of people living in crowded conditions, with individuals and families doubling up and sharing spaces. Overcrowded housing has various negative health implications and is of particular relevance in the context of COVID-19, as early evidence suggests greater spread within households where people are in sustained contact for extended periods of time.

As we work on a forthcoming report on gentrification and housing instability in the Bay Area, we sought to explore the issue of overcrowding given its current salience in the COVID-19 pandemic. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank Consumer Credit Panel / Equifax Data allows us to see how many adults live in the same household and how this number changes after a person moves residences within the Bay Area. Using these data, we examined the extent to which people...

Author(s): Michael D. Bauer and Glenn D. Rudebusch

The level of the social discount rate (SDR) is a crucial factor for evaluating the costs of climate change. We demonstrate that the equilibrium or steady-state real interest rate is the fundamental anchor for market-based SDRs. Much recent research has pointed to a decrease in the equilibrium real interest rate since the 1990s. Using new estimates of this decline, we document a pronounced downward shift in the entire term structure of SDRs in recent decades. This lower new normal for interest rates and SDRs has substantially boosted the estimated economic loss from climate change and the social cost of carbon.

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The Federal Reserve's community development function promotes the economic resilience and mobility of low- to moderate-income and underserved households and communities across the country. The spread of COVID-19 is having an impact on communities nationwide. To best respond to this crisis, information is needed about the scope and scale of the pandemic’s challenges. Throughout 2020, all 12 Reserve Banks and the Fed Board of Governors are surveying representatives of nonprofit organizations, financial institutions, government agencies, and other community organizations to understand the effects of COVID-19 on low- to moderate-income communities and the entities serving them. The results of each survey will be released as a downloadable report.

Author(s): Shelby R. Buckman, Reuven Glick, Kevin J. Lansing, Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau, and Lily M. Seitelman

We demonstrate a methodology for replicating and projecting the path of COVID-19 using a simple epidemiology model. We fit the model to daily data on the number of infected cases in China, Italy, the United States, and Brazil. These four countries can be viewed as representing different stages, from later to earlier, of a COVID-19 epidemic cycle. We solve for a model-implied effective reproduction number Rt each day so that the model closely replicates the daily number of currently infected cases in each country. For out-of-sample projections, we fit a behavioral function to the in-sample data that allows for the endogenous response of Rt to movements in the lagged number of infected cases. We show that declines in measures of population mobility tend to precede declines in the model-implied reproduction numbers for each country. This pattern suggests that...

Author(s): Daniel J. Wilson

Using high-frequency panel data for U.S. counties, I estimate the full dynamic response of COVID-19 cases and deaths to exogenous movements in mobility and weather. I find several important results. First, weather and mobility are highly correlated and thus omitting either factor when studying the COVID-19 effects of the other is likely to result in substantial omitted variable bias. Second, temperature is found to have a negative and significant effect on future COVID-19 cases and deaths, though the estimated effect is sensitive to which measure of mobility is included in the regression. Third, controlling for weather, overall mobility is found to have a large positive effect on subsequent growth in COVID-19 cases and deaths. The effects become significant around 2 weeks ahead and persist through around 8 weeks ahead for cases and around 9 weeks ahead for deaths. The peak impact occurs 4 to 6 weeks ahead for cases and around 8 to 9 weeks...