Chicago Fed Letter
The Growth and Challenges of Cyber Insurance
By Andrew Granato and Andy Polacek
Cyberattacks have grown in frequency and cost over the past decade, with high-profile cases, such as the 2013 Target data breach, the 2017 Equifax data breach, and the leak of Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 election making national headlines. Ransomware attacks, intellectual property theft, and fraud cost companies billions in recovery expenses, fines, and lost revenues every year. More firms are purchasing cyber insurance as a way to cover losses and expenses resulting from cyber incidents.
Which Leading Indicators Have Done Better at Signaling Past Recessions?
By David Kelley
In this article, I analyze a broad range of leading indicators—economic or financial data series that change in advance of the rest of the economy—to see which ones have done better at signaling past U.S. recessions. I also use these leading indicators to form a new index that outperforms existing leading indexes and the Treasury yield curve at signaling historical downturns.
How Similar Are Credit Scores Across Generations?
By Daniel Hartley, Bhash Mazumder, and Aastha Rajan
With the rise in economic inequality in the United States in recent decades, there has been growing concern about whether there is a sufficient degree of equality of opportunity in our society. Policymakers and researchers alike often focus on studies of intergenerational mobility as a way of assessing opportunity. These studies typically analyze distinct aspects of socioeconomic status, such as income, education, occupational status, and health, and measure the association in these outcomes between parents and their adult children. If the association (level of similarity) is very high, then this may indicate that there is low mobility and relatively little opportunity for poor children to overcome their initial economic disadvantage.
Understanding Recent Fluctuations in Short-Term Interest Rates
In mid-September 2019, there were sudden, large fluctuations in short-term interest rates. Why did these fluctuations happen, and what do they tell us about the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy toolkit?
