Crop yields have been strong in the Seventh District and commodity prices robust, according to the third quarter 2022 issue of the Chicago Fed AgLetter. Its author, David Oppedahl, a policy advisor at the Chicago Fed, discusses these and other topics covered in the latest and previous issues, including rising farmland values and the impact of the war in Ukraine on Midwest agriculture. The conve... Read More

Business cycles are periodic fluctuations in economic activity around its long-term historical trend. Over the past 70 years, the U.S. economy has gone through several business cycles, with each one involving a recession phase and expansion phase.1 No business cycle is exactly the same in terms of what led to the recession, which sectors of the economy were most adversely affected, and how the e... Read More

On September 28–29, 2022, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research will cohost a conference called Creating Conversations on the Challenges and Opportunities Facing Rural Economic Development in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Ahead of this event, we provide a primer on how some governmental institutions define rural and related terminology to help establi... Read More

David Oppedahl, senior business economist at the Chicago Fed, discusses agriculture conditions in the Seventh District, delving into data from the latest Chicago Fed AgLetter, crop and livestock prices, the current growing season, and the impact of the war in Ukraine on global markets. Q: What did the second quarter of 2022 tell us about the state of the Midwest agriculture industry? A: The ag... Read More

In this blog post, our primary aim is to examine whether and how moving patterns between states, metropolitan areas, and other locations across the U.S. have changed since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Using migration data from United Van Lines,1 we compare migration patterns in 2018 and 2019, before the pandemic started within the U.S., with those in 2020 and 2... Read More

During the pandemic the federal government provided multiple rounds of fiscal support for state and local governments, businesses, and households. One of the larger packages came from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) of 2021. Enacted on March 11, 2021, ARPA provides $1.9 trillion in total funding, with $350 billion in support for state and local governments. In this blog post, I outline the s... Read More

The Covid-19 pandemic caused a massive worldwide economic shock. Within the United States, no region was spared. The state with the smallest employment decline at the beginning of the pandemic—Wyoming—still lost 9% of its workers from January through April of 2020. Moreover, there were six states—Hawaii, Michigan, Nevada, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont—that saw employment drop by over 20... Read More

When analyzing an area’s economic growth, economists commonly classify the determinants of growth as being either cyclical or structural. A cyclical factor plays out over a short period of time and typically has a small effect beyond then. In contrast, a structural factor can affect an area’s growth over many years or even decades. The Covid-19 pandemic is largely a cyclical event that has domina... Read More

The Seventh District (and the nation) experienced strong growth during 2021 as the economy recovered from the pandemic recession. But the ebbs and flows of the pandemic continue to hold sway over the pace of economic activity and prevented a complete recovery. The labor market tightened considerably over the year, while supply chain constraints held back growth in manu... Read More

At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, many workplaces in the U.S. were closed (either voluntarily or by government order) to limit the spread of the virus. Some of these workplaces, such as factories, reopened within a few months. Yet many other workplaces remained closed, and the vast majority of their employees continued to perform their tasks off-site. The... Read More