By Steven K. Beckner
CLEVELAND (MNI) – Although falling home prices, foreclosures and
declines in home owners’ equity are making it difficult for many people
to move to a new home, those problems are having only a limited impact
on labor markets, the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s top economist said
Thursday.
Joseph Tracy, executive vice president and senior advisor to New
York Fed President William Dudley, said that when most Americans move
from one home to another the move is local and therefore does not affect
labor mobility from one area of the country to another.
Tracy, participating in a seminar at a housing summit sponsored by
the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, estimated in preliminary research
findings that 75% of all moves are local.
Therefore, he said the current difficulties in which people are
having selling one home and buying another have more effect on their
ability to “trade up” to a better house in the same region than their
ability to move to another region to take a job.
But he said housing market “frictions” are affecting labor mobility
for at least a portion of the workforce.
[TOPICS: M$U$$$,MMUFE$,MGU$$$,MFU$$$,M$$BR$]
