After forty-three months of forbearance, the pause on federal student loan payments has ended. Originally enacted at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, the administrative forbearance and interest waiver lasted until September 1, 2023, and borrowers’ monthly payments resumed this month. As discussed in an accompanying post, the pause on student loan payments afforded borrowers over $260 billion in waived payments throughout the pandemic, supporting borrowers’ consumption and...| Liberty Street Economics
The strength of consumer spending so far this year has surprised most private forecasters. In this post, we examine the factors behind this strength and the implications for consumption in the coming quarters. First, we revisit the measurement of “excess savings” that households have accumulated since 2020, finding that the estimates of remaining excess savings are very sensitive to assumptions about measurement, estimation period, and trend type, which renders them less useful. We thus...| Liberty Street Economics
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Donghoon Lee is an economic research advisor in Microeconomics. His primary research interests include housing economics, household finance, and labor economics. Prior to joining the New York Fed, Mr. Lee was an assistant professor at New York University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.| www.newyorkfed.org
Andrew Haughwout is the deputy director of research in the Research and Statistics Group. He is a co-editor of the Liberty Street Economics blog and a co-editor of the Bank's Economic Policy Review. In addition to his duties at the Bank, he is a Penn Institute for Urban Research Scholar and serves on the Advisory Board of the Journal of Regional Science. He is a past Chair of the North American Regional Science Council and the Federal Reserve System Committee on Regional Analysis. Prior to jo...| www.newyorkfed.org
Wilbert van der Klaauw is an economic research advisor in Microeconomics. He is also the director of the Center for Microeconomic Data and chair of the Research Group’s Workforce and Recruiting Committee. He is a labor economist and applied econometrician whose research interests include the study of life cycle labor supply and occupational choice decisions, household financial behavior and expectations, the economic determinants of household formation and dissolution, educational investmen...| www.newyorkfed.org