Tight labor markets = better jobs (not just higher pay) www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds...

I think Ethan is the only one I've seen flag this vibes paper. One of the most striking graphs of the decade--all of a sudden spending completely decoupled from sentiment and correlation has stayed at near zero for years

Ethan Struby@estruby.bsky.social · 2mo ago

chicago fed wades into the consumer sentiment debate www.chicagofed.org/publications...

Unexpected finding: Chatting with LLMs in the midst of classic economic decision tasks (portfolio allocation, dictator game, etc) tended to depolarize people -- they moved *away* from their initial decisions. This despite AI sycophantically echoing users. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

In sum, 1. Labor market remarkably strong in many ways but signals of change mixed. Job growth & low unemployment positive. Low hiring & decelerating wage growth worrying 2. Lots of uncertainty, Gulf War III energy price spike, policy swings & tech change. Employers still like deer in headlights

“.. Quite something. Information sector payrolls have fallen to their lowest since March 2021 ... 16 consecutive months of net job loss.” - Schwab #NFP

My wife Dana Lok just published this exquisite interactive project with Triple Canopy. It's about holes but also language and metaphors and knowledge. canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/a-h...

I'm sure this isn't the final word on the matter. But it would be funny if after all the dueling theories and measurement debates, the declining labor share ended up just being a byproduct of rising material costs www.nber.org/papers/w35114

The FT @financialtimes.com is hiring a new data journalist to join our US data and visuals team in New York. Great job, great team, great place to work. Apply here 👉 job-boards.eu.greenhouse.io/financialtim...

Meta will begin keystroke logging US employees at work -- complete with mouse movements and periodic screenshots -- to train better AI agents. This comes after Boz posted about a future in which AI will "primarily do the work" at meta. It's a new era for tech labor. www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

Exclusive: Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training data

Meta is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees’ computers to capture ​mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes for use in training its ‌artificial-intelligence models, part of a broad ...

reuters.com

A happy update: My job market paper is now accepted at the Journal of Labor Economics. Since I never did a proper thread on it, here goes. (Disclaimer: The views expressed in this paper are solely my own and do not reflect those of my employer, NYC IBO.)

startup naming conventions going full Dickens

Christopher Mims@mims.bsky.social · 4mo ago

cursed image

Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?

6/ The unemployment rate for 20-24 year olds is falling sharply - March it was the lowest it's been since early 2024. Less of an improvement in the unemployment rate for people in their late teens.

Some wild details in this NYT story on what is kind of sort of the first one-person billion-dollar company -- a middleman for GLP-1s. Purportedly $20k in token costs to get to 9-digit revenue. AI everything, except when you call customer service and get routed to the CEO.

excited to read this

Arin Dube@arindube.bsky.social · 4mo ago

It's pub day!

JOLTS release once again confirming that the no-hire, no-fire labor market continues. Also lines up with UI claims, which also show no signs of layoffs picking up.

Nick Timiraos@nicktimiraos.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The no-hire, no-fire labor market. The private-sector hiring rate fell to 3.3% in February, the lowest since Feb. 2010, when the unemployment rate stood at 9.7%. The layoff rate, however, continues to hold steady at low levels.

A dispiriting finding in the fascinating new working paper on household ChatGPT use (just written up in the Wall Street Journal): increased chatbot usage is associated with decreased news consumption. arxiv.org/pdf/2603.03144

🚨New working paper alert! 🚨 The US spends huge $ on special education services for students with disabilities. Is that spending effective? Today we released a working paper suggesting it is. "Special Education Substantially Improves Learning: Evidence from Three States" Let me explain...

This seems like a big change in a decade, wonder if it's validated elsewhere. Theoretically, information technologies like AI should increase managers' span of control. www.wsj.com/business/how...

I don't know how tight the historical causality is here, but I do love the idea that Excel was the catalyst of late-20th century financialization davidoks.blog/p/how-the-sp...

It's briefly noted in today's NYT story on the new Census figures, but the upward revision to NYC domestic migration figures -- and the subsequent drop-off in international migration -- are really quite large. Net intl migration to NYC fell by about 70% in 2025. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/26/n...

A new contribution to the mass of working papers examining AI impacts to software coders, this one from two Fed economists. Headline finding: coder employment is *very roughly* 500k below the counterfactual. [Insert a million caveats here] www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds...

I’m used to hearing about historical junctures as overdetermined. Are they ever underdetermined? Determined just the right amount?

TIL Card and Krueger employed an undergrad's grandmother to carry out their survey. www.wsj.com/economy/jobs...

Ah, finally, a clear and unambiguous AI job impact signal. Just what a Senior Economist wants to see.

📢New WP: Minimum Wages and Workplace Injuries Using California state and local minimum wage increases 2000-2019, we find minimum wage hikes increase workplace injury rates for low-wage workers. A plausible mechanism is work intensification 🧵 w/ @rjisungpark.bsky.social & Michael Davies

Wrote this up in a longer format: besttrousers.substack.com/p/the-vibece...

The Vibecession Hasn’t Gone Away

And the most comforting explanation of it is wrong

besttrousers.substack.com

Matt Darling@besttrousers.bsky.social · 6mo ago

That a lot of the story of 2024 is the American *consumer* class going Kalecki is really important and something we need to deal with; instead of pretending something more convenient happened.

Nice intervention on the K-shaped economy by @ernietedeschi.bsky.social. Funny the "K" narrative took hold at the same time that high-paying / high-skill sectors eased up so much on hiring (see also the elevated unemployment rate for young college grads) stripeeconomics.substack.com/p/k-shaped-e...

Everyone’s talking about the K-shaped economy—the rich pulling away while everyone else stagnates. In our inaugural Stripe Economics post, I take a look at Stripe + macro data, and I see the K on Wall Street, but not yet on Main Street stripeeconomics.substack.com/p/k-shaped-e...