In January, Brookings’s Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy held a conference to identify, through agreement and disagreement, what we can learn from the pandemic. Louise Sheiner, David Wessel, and Elijah Asdourian, all of Brookings, just released their summary, “The US Labor Market Post-Covid—what has changed and what hasn’t?” The first subhead covering the opening panel tells us one thing hasn’t changed, the ongoing debate on how to measure labor-market slack, central to the Fed’s mission. The authors note that because the unemployment rate was tracking other measures, such as the ratio of job vacancies and the number of unemployed (V/U), and the quit rate closely, it was “widely regarded” to be sufficient into 2019. Now with the unemployment […]
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“News heard,” red and blue
In early 2022, Richard Curtin, then director of the UMich confidence survey, wrote that partisan views are now, “unfortunately,” completely...
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A Letter to the Past
Professors Lusina Grigoryan, of York University, and Madalina Vlasceanu, of New York University, recently led a study on what works and what...
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2023Q2 Hard Employment Data Confirms BLS Estimates
There’s been a lot of controversy about the accuracy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ recent job projections, but hard employment...