St. Louis Fed's Review: Trends in Neighborhood-Level Unemployment in the United States: 1980-2000; Stock Market Booms and Monetary Policy in the Twentieth Century; Data, Data, and Yet More Data; Data Dependence

ST. LOUIS — The March/April issue of Review, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis' journal of economic and business issues, features the following articles. The publication is also available on the St. Louis Fed's web site.

• "Trends in Neighborhood-Level Unemployment in the United States: 1980-2000." Underlying the national unemployment statistics is a little-known trend: the increasing concentration of unemployed workers in certain neighborhoods within the nation's metropolitan areas. Those neighborhoods, in effect, are becoming increasingly polarized into two groups: those with high rates of unemployment and those with low rates. Economist Christopher H. Wheeler analyzes several possible explanations. and concludes that workers seem to be segregating themselves more and more by both income and college education.
• "Stock Market Booms and Monetary Policy in the Twentieth Century." Economists Michael D. Bordo and David C. Wheelock examine the association between stock market booms and monetary policy in the United States and nine other industrialized countries during the 20th century. They find that as was true of the U.S. stock market boom of 1994-2000, booms typically arose during periods of above-average growth of real output and below-average inflation. This suggests that booms reflect both real macroeconomic phenomena and monetary policy. Bordo and Wheelock find little evidence that booms were fueled by excessive liquidity, and they note that booms often ended within a few months of an increase in inflation and consequent tightening of monetary policy.
• "Data, Data, and Yet More Data." This is a reprint of a speech by William Poole, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, presented on Oct. 16, 2006, at the Association for University Business and Economic Research Annual Meeting, University of Memphis, Memphis, Tenn.
• "Data Dependence." This is a reprint of a speech by William Poole, presented on Sept. 29, 2006, at the Middle Tennessee State University Annual Economic Outlook Conference.

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