Reference at Newman Library

FRED Adds IMF Data

This December the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis added a collection of IMF data to its database of U.S. and international economic time series, FRED.  The data includes 399 financial statistics and monetary aggregates including interest rates, exchange rates, and measures of M1, M2, and M3.

Students will like this resource because of its easy to use interface. The data opens in a graph with options to download or view the underlying data or to save the graph as a pdf.

This data from the IMF is not free elsewhere but can be found in Datastream and in the paper copies of the IMF’s International Financial Statistics Yearbook (at REF HG 61 .I57)

New research from Federal Reserve Bank of NY re impact of recession on New York’s school district finances

I thought the following report, new from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, might be of interest:  “The Impact of the Great Recession on School District Finances: Evidence from New York,” Rajashri Chakrabarti and Elizabeth Setren (no. 534, December 2011)
JEL codes: H40, I21, I28

This summary was prepared by the Federal Reserve Bank:
Despite education’s fundamental role in human capital formation and growth, there is no research that examines the effect of the Great Recession (or any other recession) on schools. The authors’ paper begins to fill this gap. Exploiting detailed data on school finance indicators and an analysis of trend shifts, they examine how the Great Recession affected school funding in New York State. While Chakrabarti and Setren find no evidence of effects on either total revenue or expenditure, there were important compositional changes to both. There is strong evidence of substitution of funds on the revenue side–the infusion of funds from the federal stimulus occurred simultaneously with statistically and economically significant cuts in state and local financing, especially the former. On the expenditure side, instructional expenditure was maintained, while other categories such as transportation, student activities, and utilities suffered. Important heterogeneities in experiences are also observed by poverty level, metropolitan area, school district size, and urban status. Affluent districts were hurt the most; the New York City metro area, especially Nassau County, sustained the largest losses in terms of both revenue and expenditure. The authors findings promise to facilitate an understanding of how recessions affect schools and of the role policy can play in mitigating the consequences.
http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr534.html