🏛️ Federal Reserve District Monitor
Report Date: April 4, 2026
Coverage Period: March 5 – April 4, 2026 (30 days)
Districts Monitored: NY, RIC, ATL, STL, DAL, SF, MIN
Executive Summary
This month's output from Federal Reserve district banks is dominated by two cross-cutting themes: tariff and trade policy effects and artificial intelligence and the labor market. Six of the seven monitored districts contributed research in the past 30 days (Minneapolis was unreachable due to access errors).
On trade and tariffs, San Francisco Fed economists quantify how tariffs differentially hit inflation components and how Fed communications shape inflation expectations. New York Fed examines how Treasury market liquidity — severely disrupted by April 2025 tariff announcements — has since recovered. Dallas Fed dissects how Chinese multinationals are reshaping global structural transformation. These publications together suggest a research community acutely focused on the macroeconomic transmission of trade shocks.
On AI and productivity, Atlanta Fed surveyed nearly 750 corporate executives to find significant heterogeneity in AI adoption, with large firms expecting workforce reductions but small firms expecting modest employment gains. St. Louis Fed researchers find a major US–Europe AI adoption gap. Richmond Fed's brief on stablecoins and dollar demand reflects the broader wave of digital-asset research running through district banks. The Dallas Fed adds a concrete data-center channel: AI-driven electricity demand is already lifting wholesale power prices 3–5%, with projections of 20–50% increases by 2028.
On labor and macro, Dallas Fed provides new evidence that unauthorized immigration raises housing costs without expanding supply — a demand-side shock. STL Fed decomposes recent wage and employment growth into supply and demand drivers. SF Fed finds tight financial conditions tilt investment toward cheaper but less energy-efficient capital.
New York Fed (2nd District)
Content Type: Liberty Street Economics Blog | New Items: 5
Henry Dyer & Michael J. Fleming
Published: 2026-04-02
Examines how U.S. Treasury market liquidity evolved over the past year following the tariff-induced stress of April 2025, finding that conditions worsened markedly at announcement, then recovered and stabilized through February 2026. Timely context for fixed-income investors assessing renewed tariff risks.
Lily Gordon & Lee Seltzer
Published: 2026-03-31
Documents how modern financial holding company organizational structures have evolved, emphasizing why corporate architecture details matter for accurate financial system analysis and regulatory monitoring.
Jacob Goss & Daniel Mangrum
Published: 2026-03-25
Finds that legalization of sports betting raises overall credit delinquency by roughly 0.3 percentage points, offering quantitative evidence linking consumer financial stress to gambling legalization waves.
Thomas Klitgaard
Published: 2026-03-23
Analyzes China's expansion in advanced electric technology industries — passenger EVs and batteries — and their growing contribution to China's trade surplus, with implications for U.S. trade and industrial policy debates.
Marco Del Negro, Ibrahima Diagne, Keshav Dogra, Elena Elbarmi, Donggyu Lee & Michael Pham
Published: 2026-03-20
Quarterly structural model forecast showing stronger 2026 growth and more persistent inflation compared to December 2025 projections, driven by stronger investment and cost-push shocks — consistent with a tariff-driven supply-side repricing.
Richmond Fed (5th District)
Content Type: Economic Briefs | New Items: 3
Thomas A. Lubik
Published: April 2026 (EB 26-11)
Explores methods for identifying and measuring underlying inflation trend, distinguishing durable from transitory price movements — directly relevant for interpreting the current inflation path relative to the Fed's 2% target.
Marina Azzimonti-Renzo & Vincenzo Quadrini
Published: March 2026 (EB 26-10)
Analyzes how the proliferation of USD-backed digital stablecoins might affect demand for traditional U.S. currency, with implications for monetary transmission and the Fed's balance sheet.
Paul Ho
Published: March 2026 (EB 26-09)
Assesses the remaining distance to the Fed's 2% inflation target and identifies the key risks and challenges on the disinflation path — essential context for rate path expectations.
Atlanta Fed (6th District)
Content Type: Working Papers | New Items: 2 (confirmed March 2026)
Salomé Baslandze, Zach Edwards, John Graham, Ty McClure, Brent Meyer, Michael Sparks, Sonya Ravindranath Waddell & Daniel J. Weitz
Published: 2026-03-25 (WP 2026-04)
Survey of ~750 corporate executives finds large AI adoption heterogeneity across firms; more than half have invested in AI. Large firms expect workforce reductions; smaller firms anticipate modest employment gains. Routine clerical roles declining, demand for skilled technical positions rising — with negligible near-term aggregate employment effect.
Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Steven J. Davis, Kevin Foster, Aaron Jalca, Brent Meyer, Paul Mizen, Michael Navarrete, Pawel Smietanka, Gregory Thwaites, Ben Wang & Ivan Yotzov
Published: Early 2026 (WP 2026-03)
Analyzes firm-level data on AI implementation and adoption patterns across businesses, providing a comprehensive cross-country empirical foundation for studying AI's macroeconomic footprint.
St. Louis Fed (8th District)
Content Type: Working Papers | New Items: 4
Lutz Hendricks, Tatyana Koreshkova & Oksana Leukhina
Published: 2026-03-26 (WP 2026-05)
Quantitative model finds a 20% expansion of selective public universities yields 0.8% aggregate earnings growth and 2% welfare gains; earnings benefits exceed financing costs by 8×. High-ability students previously excluded show strong graduation rates and significant income improvements.
Maximiliano Dvorkin & Cassandra Marks
Published: 2026 (WP 2026-04)
Separates supply-side and demand-side factors driving the recent wage and employment surge, offering a structural lens to interpret whether the labor market's resilience is demand- or supply-driven.
Alexander Bick, Adam Blandin, David Deming, Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln & Jonas Jessen
Published: 2026 (WP 2026-03)
Documents a substantial transatlantic gap in AI adoption, investigating structural and institutional factors behind the US–Europe divergence — with implications for relative productivity growth trajectories.
Serdar Birinci, Loukas Karabarbounis & Kurt See
Published: 2026 (WP 2026-02)
Investigates the secular convergence in hours worked between U.S. workers and their international counterparts, documenting structural shifts in labor supply that challenge long-held assumptions about American work culture and labor market exceptionalism.
Dallas Fed (11th District)
Content Type: Working Papers | New Items: 3
Vanessa Alviarez, Cheng Chen, Nitya Pandalai-Nayar, Liliana Varela, Kei-Mu Yi & Hongyong Zhang
Published: 2026-03-30 (WP 2608)
Uses Japanese confidential microdata and a quasi-exogenous reform expanding foreign investment in China to show that multinationals shift parent employment from manufacturing into R&D and higher-value services, accounting for a substantial share of manufacturing reallocation in middle-income countries.
Daniel Wilson & Xiaoqing Zhou
Published: 2026-03-23 (WP 2607)
Analyzes the 2021–2024 unauthorized immigration surge using administrative microdata; finds employment expanded proportionally without wage suppression, but housing costs rose sharply without supply expansion (demand-side shock). Also documents declines in per-capita labor income and government transfers.
Owen Kay, Robert Reaser & Reid Taylor
Published: 2026-03-20 (WP 2606)
Using an hourly dispatch model across continental wholesale electricity markets, finds existing data centers have already raised wholesale prices 3–5% nationally (larger in data center hubs). If planned construction proceeds, prices could rise 20–50% by 2028 — a major input cost risk for the broader economy.
San Francisco Fed (12th District)
Content Type: Economic Letters & Working Papers | New Items: 4
Michael Bauer & Wesley Wasserburger
Published: 2026-03-31
Finds hawkish Fed communication surprises lower market-based inflation expectations while dovish surprises raise them, with stronger effects at longer horizons — validating the signaling channel of forward guidance and relevant for how markets will read any pivot communication.
Naomi Halbersleben, Oscar Jorda & Fernanda Nechio
Published: 2026-03-30
Quantifies how tariff policies differentially impact goods, services, and other inflation components, providing a decomposition tool for forecasters trying to parse the tariff-driven vs. domestic inflationary dynamics in 2026.
Sanjay R. Singh
Published: 2026-03-31
Revisits the equity premium puzzle using novel household-level panel data to measure imperfect risk sharing, identifying high-income/low-net-worth households whose volatile consumption may be sufficient to explain the historically large equity risk premium.
Oscar Jorda, Fernanda Nechio, Toan Phan & Felipe Schwartzman
Published: 2026-03-20
Using 150 years of data across 17 countries, shows tight financial conditions shift investment toward cheaper but less energy-efficient capital by reducing the present value of future energy savings — a novel channel linking monetary policy to the energy transition.
Minneapolis Fed (9th District)
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Access Error: All attempts to reach Minneapolis Fed research pages returned HTTP 403 errors. No content could be retrieved for this reporting period. Minneapolis Fed research is available at
minneapolisfed.org/research.
Thematic Analysis
Tariffs & Trade Policy
NY Fed: Treasury market liquidity nearly fully recovered from April 2025 tariff shock; conditions stabilized by Feb 2026.
SF Fed: Tariff effects on inflation are component-specific — goods inflation bears the primary burden; services more insulated.
NY Fed: China's electric vehicle and battery exports are reshaping trade balances and trade-policy dynamics.
Dallas Fed: Multinational FDI into China shifts parent-company employment from manufacturing into R&D, reinforcing deindustrialization pressures in advanced economies.
Monetary Policy & Inflation
SF Fed: Fed forward guidance credibly shifts market inflation expectations, with larger effects at longer horizons — supporting the case for clear communication during the current tariff-inflation episode.
Richmond Fed: Two briefs assess the inflation path: trend inflation methodologies (Lubik) and progress toward 2% (Ho) — both relevant to rate path debates.
NY Fed DSGE: March 2026 model forecast signals stronger growth and stickier inflation than December 2025 anticipated — fewer near-term rate cuts implied.
Artificial Intelligence & Productivity
Atlanta Fed: Executive survey finds AI adoption already majority among large firms; clerical roles declining, technical roles rising — no near-term aggregate employment shock but meaningful compositional shifts.
STL Fed: Europe significantly lags the U.S. in AI adoption — transatlantic productivity divergence may widen.
Dallas Fed: AI-driven data center electricity demand a major emerging macro risk — wholesale power prices could rise 20–50% by 2028 in affected regions.
Labor Markets
STL Fed: Wage/employment decomposition separates supply from demand drivers — key for assessing whether recent labor strength is sustainable.
STL Fed: U.S. workers no longer work substantially more than non-Americans — a structural convergence with implications for relative productivity assessments.
Dallas Fed: Unauthorized immigration 2021–2024: employment expanded; wages unaffected; housing costs rose sharply; government transfers fell — net distributional effects are complex.
Finance & Financial Markets
NY Fed: Bank holding company structures are increasingly complex — a data-quality and regulatory-design concern.
NY Fed: Sports betting legalization causally raises credit delinquencies — a consumer finance risk quietly building across states.
Richmond Fed: Stablecoins could meaningfully affect dollar demand — emerging systemic relevance for Fed monetary operations.
SF Fed: Tight financial conditions reduce investment in energy-efficient capital — a monetary-policy/green-transition interaction that could slow decarbonization.
Education & Human Capital
STL Fed: Expanding selective public university capacity yields 8× return on financing cost — strong social ROI case for higher-ed investment.
Atlanta Fed: 20th-century educational mobility gains closely tied to public education expansion — historical evidence for education's long-run distributional role.
Notable Highlights for Investors
NY Fed — Treasury Market Liquidity Since April 2025: Liquidity has recovered from the April 2025 tariff shock but remains fragile — a baseline caution for positioning in a tariff-volatile environment heading into renewed trade actions.
SF Fed — Effects of Tariffs on Components of Inflation: Goods inflation is most exposed to tariff pass-through; services inflation is more insulated. Directly relevant for CPI disaggregation and rate-path modeling.
SF Fed — Fed Communications and Inflation Expectations: Fed hawkish surprises durably shift long-run inflation expectations lower — markets should monitor for forward guidance shifts as primary rate signals.
Dallas Fed — Processing Power: Data Centers and Electricity Markets: AI infrastructure buildout is already raising wholesale electricity prices. By 2028, regional prices could rise 20–50% — a material cost risk for energy-intensive industries and utilities sector.
Dallas Fed — Unauthorized Immigration and Housing Markets: Demand shock without supply response = housing cost inflation without traditional supply safety valve. Confirms structural housing shortage dynamics.
NY Fed DSGE — March 2026: Structural model now projects stronger growth and more persistent inflation than the December 2025 vintage — a hawkish signal from the Fed's own forecasting apparatus.
Richmond Fed — Stablecoins and Dollar Demand: Rising stablecoin adoption could structurally affect dollar velocity and Fed balance-sheet dynamics — an emerging macro variable to monitor.
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Generated by Claude Code · boquin.xyz · Data sourced from Federal Reserve district websites via Liberty Street Economics, Richmond Fed, Atlanta Fed, St. Louis Fed, Dallas Fed, San Francisco Fed · April 4, 2026