April 16th at noon

Housing Markets and Policy

Friday Virtual Seminar Series
April 16, 2021
12 noon to 1:45 pm ET

This seminar is free.  Pre-registration is required. Register in advance at this Zoom link. Maximum capacity is 100 participants.

This session features three papers on the timely topic of housing, a sector of the economy that is once again garnering attention in the news and continues to inspire interesting academic research. The first paper examines the housing market’s rent response to changes in supply, drawing evidence from a recent sizable expansion to Washington DC’s apartment housing stock. Also using data from the DC market, the second paper investigates whether “green buildings” (with LEED certification) garner a rental premium, consistent with potential savings on utilities and operating expenses. The third paper exploits variation in housing tax policy to explore how education and earnings outcomes later in life are affected by growing up in Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) housing.

Chair: Scott Wentland (US Bureau of Economic Analysis)

The Impact of an Increasing Housing Supply on Housing Prices: The Case of the District of Columbia, 2000-2018
Bethel L. Cole-Smith (Howard University) and Daniel Muhammad (Government of DC)

The Effect of Green-Building Certification on Housing Rental Prices in the District of Columbia
Nyanya Browne (Howard University) and Daniel Muhammad (Government of DC)

Does Growing Up in Tax-subsidized Housing Lead to Higher Earnings and Educational Attainment?
Elena C. Derby (Joint Committee on Taxation)

Discussants: Justin Contat (Federal Housing Finance Agency); Abdul Munisib (US Bureau of Economic Analysis); Jeremy Moulton (UNC-Chapel Hill)

Posted in Announcements, Seminars

Webinar: Economic Growth During Covid-19 Vaccine Rollout

Wednesday, April 7, 2021, 5:00 p.m. – 6:30 p.m

This seminar is free.  Pre-registration is required. Register in advance at this zoom link. Maximum capacity is 100 participants.

Panelists:

Dr. Jeff Werling, Director of Macroeconomic Analysis, Congressional Budget Office

Dr. Wendy Edelberg, Director, The Hamilton Project, Brookings Institution

During the year from March 2020 until March 2021 over thirty million cases and 540 thousand deaths occurred in the United States from the covid-19 pandemic and 122 million cases and 2,690 deaths occurred worldwide. It was the worst health crisis since the influenza pandemic of 1918.

The economic devastation has been severe. Total U.S. nonfarm employment fell by 20.5 million to the low point in April 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic could result in net losses in the range of $3.2 trillion to $4.8 trillion in U.S. real gross domestic product (GDP) over the course of two years, according to estimates from a new University of Southern California study. 

Vaccines for Covid-19 give hope that the world can return to normal. Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech developed mRNA vaccines. Johnson & Johnson, the third vaccine in the U.S., was approved for emergency use in February 2021.

Our panelists will present perspectives on these issues, followed by Q&A and discussion.

Dr. Jeff Werling is Director of Macroeconomic Analysis at the Congressional Budget Office. Prior to that position Dr. Werling was President of the Interindustry Economic Research Fund Inc.  Werling received a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Maryland in 1992.

Dr. Wendy Edelberg is Director of the Hamilton Project at the Brooking Institution and Senior Fellow in Economic Studies.  Prior to that appointment Dr. Edelberg was Chief Economist at the Congressional Budget Office. Edelberg received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.

Posted in Announcements, Seminars

2022 SGE@ASSA Sessions in Boston
Call for Papers

Submission deadline is Friday, May 14th, 2021

The Society of Government Economists organizes 7 sessions at the ASSA Annual meetings. This Call for Papers invites members wishing to give papers or organize complete sessions for SGE@ASSA meetings to submit proposals electronically via the Society of Government Economists’ website from March 15 to May 14, 2021. Go to the this link to access the submission form.

The 2022 ASSA Annual meeting will be held in Boston, MA on January 7-9, 2022 (Friday – Sunday).

This call for papers and sessions is open to all individuals (applicants need not be government economists). Submissions are competitively selected by the SGE@ASSA Committee, chaired by Wendy Li.

Posted in Conferences

March 12th at noon

Consumption and Living Standards

Friday Virtual Seminar Series
March 12, 2021
12 noon to 1:15 pm ET

This seminar is free.  Pre-registration is required. Register in advance at this Zoom link. Maximum capacity is 100 participants.

This session features two research papers on consumption and living standards. The first paper examines how living standards vary across the U.S. and discusses how each state’s welfare has evolved overtime. The second paper looks at the impact of oil booms on income inequality in the U.S. It examines both oil price variation and quantity booms from oil discoveries and discusses measures of state-level income inequality.

Chair: Misty L. Heggeness (US Census Bureau)

A Comparison of Living Standards Across the United States of America
Elena Falcettoni  (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System) and Vegard M. Nygaard (University of Houston)

Natural Resources and Inequality: Evidence from the United States
Loujaina Abdelwahed (Cooper Union) and Richard Campbell (University of Illinois at Chicago)

Discussants: Thesia Garner (Bureau of Labor Statistics); Kalee Burns (US Census Bureau)

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Posted in Announcements, Seminars

Feb 26th at noon

Economic Measurement: Prices, Productivity, and the Unemployment Rate

Friday Virtual Seminar Series
February 26, 2021
12 noon to 1:45 pm ET

This seminar is free.  Pre-registration is required. Register in advance at this Zoom link. Maximum capacity is 100 participants.

This session features three research papers on economic measurement. The first paper re-estimates historical PPIs using the geometric Young formula at the elementary level and finds the overall index is lower by 0.55 percentage points per year.  The second paper introduces the production accounts used to measure U.S. agricultural productivity (1948-2017), addresses some recent major changes, discusses some findings on sources of growth, and talks about ongoing research projects that aim to further improve the quality of US agricultural productivity measures.  The third paper assembles several historical estimates of the unemployment rate and discusses the role these private-sector estimates played in the development of official unemployment and labor force statistics.

Chair: Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia (Bureau of Labor Statistics)

An Alternative Formula for Elementary Producer Price Indexes
Jonathan C. Weinhagen, Robert S. Martin, and William M. Thompson (Bureau of Labor Statistics)

U.S. Agricultural Productivity: Measurement and Sources of Growth (1948-2017)
Sun Ling Wang, Roberto Mosheim, Richard Nehring, and Eric Njuki (USDA-ERS)

Private Sector Estimates of Unemployment Rate and the Development of the Labor Force Concept Gabriel Mathy (American University)

Discussants: Dennis Fixler (Bureau of Economic Analysis); Corby Garner (Bureau of Labor Statistics); Peter Meyer (Bureau of Labor Statistics)

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Posted in Announcements

February 5th noon seminar

Macro and Banking

Friday Virtual Seminar Series

Friday February 5, 2021

12:00 p.m. to 1:45 p.m.

This seminar is free.  Pre-registration is required. Register in advance at this Zoom link. Maximum capacity is 100 participants.

This session features two research papers on how information informs risk estimates and policies. The first one examines the trade-offs between target fund levels and insurer insolvency risk faced by deposit insurer. The authors develop a model and estimate the sizable gap between an optimal target fund level for the FDIC (as an example) and the official FDIC target fund. The paper also explores funding strategies to achieve alternative target fund levels.  The second paper uses a new approach to estimate and decompose the weight forecasters place on past predictions in expectation formation process. Forecasters put a weight on past predictions and the persistence of old information is affected by the size of new economic shocks. The author compares the optimal weight placed on past predictions to information frictions over time for US professional forecasters and find that explore the relationship between the optimal weights the magnitude of shocks.

Chair: Wenhua Di (Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas)


Bridging the Gap between the Deposit Insurance Fund Target Level and the Current Fund Level
Alexander B. Ufier (FDIC), Charles Kusaya (Zimbabwe Deposit Protection Corporation), John P. O’Keefe (Independent Consultant)


Expectation Formation and the Persistence of Shocks
Constantin Burgi (St. Mary’s College of Maryland)

Discussants: Kathleen McDill (FDIC); Chad Fulton, (Federal Reserve Board)

Posted in Announcements, Seminars

Small Banks: Transition and Crisis

Friday Virtual Seminar Series
Friday December 18, 2020
12:00 p.m. to 1:45 p.m.

This seminar is free. Please register at this Zoom link.
We can welcome up to 100 participants.

This session focuses on challenges faced by the banking sector, especially small banks, in the past 20 years. The first paper focuses on loss given default of acquisition, development, and construction loans during the Great Recession and its aftermath (2008-2012) and how those loan defaults contributed to numerous small bank failures. The second paper illustrates how monetary policy affects banks’ decisions to enter local deposit markets and how entry barriers in those markets affect establishments of differing sizes. The third paper explores how the tightening of anti-money laundering enforcement imposed disproportionate costs on small banks, shifting the local banking composition towards larger banks and how that shift affects measures of local economic well-being. The fourth paper studies the effects of changes in business credit during the COVID-19 pandemic comparing the behavior of lenders to that of borrowers during the pandemic compared to prior years and examining differences in credit issued to small and large borrowers, in both good and bad economic conditions.

Chair: Alexander B. Ufier (FDIC)

Loss Given Default for Acquisition, Development and Construction Loans
Lynn Shibut (FDIC), Emily Johnston-Ross (FDIC), Joseph Nichols (Federal Reserve Board)

The Bank Entry Channel of Monetary Policy Transmission
Stefan Lewellen (Penn State University), Emilio Bisetti (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Stephen A. Karolyi (Carnegie Mellon)

Anti-money Laundering Enforcement, Banks, and the Real Economy
Pablo Slutzky (University of Maryland), Senay Agca (George Washington University), Stefan Zeume (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Bank Lending during the Covid-19 Crisis
Teng Wang (Federal Reserve Board of Governors), Allen N. Berger (University of South Carolina), Christa H.S. Bouwman (Texas A&M University), Lars Norden (Getulio Vargas Foundation), Raluca A. Roman (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia), Gregory F. Udell, (Indiana University)

Discussants: Kayla Freeman (University of Georgia), Freddy Cama (Bay Atlantic University), Heath Witzen (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau), Chacko George (FDIC)

Posted in Announcements, Seminars

Economic Well-Being and the Supplemental Poverty Measure – Improvements and Expansion in 2021 and Beyond



Friday December 11, 2020, 12-1:45pm ET

This seminar is free.  Pre-registration is required. Register at this Zoom link.
Up to 100 participants.

How can economic well-being and poverty be measured? Ten years ago an interagency technical working group produced guidelines for a supplement to the official poverty measure. This measure is referred to as the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), and for several years now has been published as a product of collaboration by researchers at the BLS and Census Bureau with support from the SPM Interagency Technical Working Group for Implementation (ITWG-SPM).  In this session, researchers from the Census Bureau and BLS will describe planned improvements in the SPM and extensions to include data from more surveys.

Chair:  Connie Citro, National Academy of Sciences

Improvements to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure for 2021
Liana E. Fox & Trudi Renwick* (Census Bureau)

Changes to the Supplemental Poverty Measure Thresholds for 2021
Thesia Garner*, Juan Munoz, & Jake Schild (Bureau of Labor Statistics)

The Supplemental Poverty Measure Using the American Community Survey
Brian Glassman & Liana Fox* (Census Bureau), Jose Pacas (U of Minnesota)

Calculating the Supplemental Poverty Measure in the Survey of Income and Program Participation
Lewis Warren*, Liana Fox, Ashley Edwards (Census Bureau)

Discussant: David Johnson (University of Michigan)

(*designated speaker)

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Posted in Announcements, Seminars

Economics of Vaccines for COVID-19


Monday October 5, 2020
5:00 pm to 6:30 pm

This Zoom webinar is free. Register at:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUpdu6oqDItG9yhU_fH7ug8nen7y9eqYKtR. Maximum # of participants is 100.

Presenters:
Bhaven Sampat, Associate Professor, Department of Health Policy and Management, Columbia University and Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Ali Moghtaderi, Assistant Professor, Milken Institute School of Public Health, George Washington University

Bhaven Sampat will discuss how research on vaccines and viruses at the National Institutes of Health has accelerated the progress towards an effective vaccine. Bhaven’s expertise on how public research is translated into private sector results will help us understand the roots of ongoing efforts by companies, such as Moderna, Astra Zeneca, Merck, Johnson and Johnson, and Pfizer. He has published several articles on how public R&D investment affects private patenting and related topics in Review of Economic Studies, Science, and the American Economic Review. 

Ali Moghtaderi will discuss issues related to public acceptance of a vaccine, once an effective vaccine has been developed. Ali’s expertise in vaccines, especially Americans’ perspectives on taking the coronavirus vaccine, will help us understand reasons Americans have for not participating. He has published several articles on the economics of vaccines and other health economics topics in Health Affairs, JAMA, and Medical Care.

Leo Sveikauskas, economist at U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, will moderate this discussion.

Q&A will take place after the presentations.

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Posted in Announcements, Seminars

Mon 7/27: Online Panel “Housing, Homelessness, and the Pandemic”

Monday, July 27, 5 – 6:30pm (EST)

REGISTER in ADVANCE for LINK and PASSWORD: jack.ventura@verizon.net

  • Andrew Aurand, Vice President for Research, National Low Income Housing Coalition
  • Martha Galvez, Principal Research Associate, Urban Institute

According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, there are over 600,000 homeless people in the U.S., at least a third of whom are living on the streets.  The lack of affordable housing and HUD reductions to subsidized low-income housing is now exacerbated with the COVID-19 pandemic. The risk of evictions has risen sharply in the face of massive unemployment.

The seminar panelists will discuss the housing and homeless crises, the impact of the pandemic and innovative policy proposals to house vulnerable people.

  • Dr. Andrew Aurand leads the research team and publishes NLIHC’s annual reports on housing – The Gap and Out of Reach – and policy research. 
  • Ms. Martha Galvez’ research focuses on housing policy intervention impacts on families at the Urban Institute’s Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center.

The Zoom seminar is free, but pre-registration is required.

Please email SGE seminar co-chair Jack Ventura at jack.ventura@verizon.net and provide your name and email.

Pre-registrants will receive sign-in information before the Zoom seminar.

Posted in Announcements, Seminars

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