Greater Washington Works: IT and Health Careers with Promise

The Greater Washington Workforce Development Collaborative, an initiative of The Community Foundation for the National Capital Region, has partnered with JPMorgan Chase & Co. to develop new a research report, Greater Washington Works: IT and Health Careers with Promise, released today. The report focuses on how our region can address the skills gap and lift more of our neighbors out of poverty through careers in IT and Healthcare.With over 70% of net new jobs requiring post-secondary education and training, the Washington regional economy continues to be highly knowledge-based. Local employers, however, face challenges in finding skilled workers. Nearly 800,000 individuals in our region have no education past high school, highlighting a skills gap that has the potential to undermine our region's global economic competitiveness.Further, while it is encouraging that our regional unemployment rate has improved to pre-Great Recession levels, many of our neighbors are still struggling to make ends meet. Our region can count 100,000 additional residents living below the Federal poverty level since 2009. African American or Latino workers in the region are three times more likely to earn an income below the poverty level. Addressing our region's race, ethnicity, and gender-based income inequality is a critical challenge for our region to tackle if we want to ensure that all in our region have a fair shot for prosperity

How Rigid Are Producer Prices?

How rigid are producer prices? Conventional wisdom is that producer prices are more rigid than and so play less of an allocative role than do consumer prices. In the 1987-2008 micro data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for the PPI, we find that producer prices for finished goods and services in fact exhibit roughly the same rigidity as do consumer prices that include sales, and substantially less rigidity than do consumer prices that exclude sales. Large firms change prices two to three times more frequently than do small firms, and by smaller amounts, particularly for price decreases. Longer price durations are associated with larger price changes, though there is considerable heterogeneity in this relationship. Long-term contracts are associated with somewhat greater price rigidity for goods and services, though the differences are not dramatic. The size of price decreases plays a key role in inflation dynamics, while the size of price increases does not. The frequencies of price increases and decreases tend to move together, and so cancel one another out.Producer prices, consmer prices, contracts

Pandemic Priorities: Exploring unemployment and demographic characteristics of arts and culture workforces and artists across the U.S.

For over 10 years, SMU DataArts has studied the demographic makeup of arts and culture workforces and boards to help organizations better understand themselves and the communities in which they serve. From Los Angeles to Houston, from to museum professionals, we have surveyed demographic characteristics related to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability status, workplace perceptions, and more. While the results of these localized studies are very beneficial to participating organizations and their local communities, it is difficult to use this data to generalize about the state of the entire arts and culture sector in the United States.In 2021, we extended our demographics work beyond just our own studies and evaluated national data about the sector in an effort to gain deeper understanding about the makeup of the aggregate arts and culture workforce. Using data from the United States Census Bureau, in partnership with the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), via their survey known as the Current Population Survey (CPS), we are now able to assess the demographic characteristics of not only those employed in the sector but also those who are unemployed on a near real-time basis.This report explores the demographic characteristics of arts and culture workforces, both employed and unemployed, and its appendix provides contextual information about the Current Population Survey's applications and limitations as related to the arts and culture sector. Additionally, this analysis will look specifically at artists employed beyond just the arts and culture sector to better understand the larger ecosystem. We start in January 2020 to establish a baseline of pre-pandemic employment characteristics and track the monthly progression through January 2022.

Relative Risk Premium: A New “Canary” for Hotel Mortgage-Market Distress

Lenders’ evaluation of the hotel industry’s prospects can be assessed using a metric called the relative risk premium, which we introduce in this report. Similar to the canary in a coal mine, changes in the relative rates that lenders charge for hotel loans, as compared to those for office buildings, give an early warning of relative hotel loan delinquencies. This metric is based on the practice of lenders charging higher interest rates for hotel loans than on office buildings. The relative risk premium measure is defined as the interest rate on hotels minus interest rate on office buildings. Changes in this measure predict relative hotel loan delinquencies (delinquencies on hotel loans minus delinquencies on office building loans). Office loans are an appropriate benchmark to measure the relative health of hotel loans because office building occupancy has a relationship with the economy and with room-night demand. Spreads on hotel loans widen when lenders anticipate higher hotel delinquencies relative to offices and narrow during periods when relative delinquencies for hotels are expected to drop. We also find three other bellwethers for hotel delinquencies: an increase in the volatility of hotel REIT returns (risk), a negative shock to expected earnings forecasts (which signals lower expected future profitability), or an increase in unemployment. Interestingly, the converse situation doesn’t hold, and an increase in relative delinquencies is not useful in predicting a rise in the relative risk premium

The Dynamics of Credit Spreads in Hotel Mortgages and Signaling Implications

This paper investigates the loan pricing of risk in a market with short term leases (hotels) relative to longer term leases (office properties) with respect to how news on the economy, capital and real estate markets is incorporated in loan pricing using a vector autoregression (VAR) framework. The hotel loan pricing data provides a unique laboratory to study loan pricing adjustments given the short-term nature of the hotel leases. We examine the information content of hotel credit spreads in two stages. After establishing the impact of economic variables on loan pricing and the informational content of the incremental risk spread, we next examine how loan pricing adjusts in response to expected delinquencies. We find that improvement in general economic conditions, an increase in forward looking corporate profitability, an increase in capital availability and/or an increase in the demand for hotel services forecast a decline in the hotel risk premium differential. Thus, the relative loan prices—the spread—reflect systematic risk. We also find that hotel spreads themselves contain important economic information. Unexpected increases in hotel spreads predict hotel delinquencies. In other words, lenders appear to set interest rates on hotel mortgages in anticipation of hotel delinquencies and foreclosures in future periods. Lenders do not appear to consider past delinquencies in their setting their rate

Spatial Manifestations of Order Reduction in Runge-Kutta Methods for Initial Boundary Value Problems

This paper studies the spatial manifestations of order reduction that occur when time-stepping initial-boundary-value problems (IBVPs) with high-order Runge-Kutta methods. For such IBVPs, geometric structures arise that do not have an analog in ODE IVPs: boundary layers appear, induced by a mismatch between the approximation error in the interior and at the boundaries. To understand those boundary layers, an analysis of the modes of the numerical scheme is conducted, which explains under which circumstances boundary layers persist over many time steps. Based on this, two remedies to order reduction are studied: first, a new condition on the Butcher tableau, called weak stage order, that is compatible with diagonally implicit Runge-Kutta schemes; and second, the impact of modified boundary conditions on the boundary layer theory is analyzed.Comment: 41 pages, 9 figure