Larry Warren

NBER Launches Initiative on Economic Measurement

NBER launches initiative on economic measurement. nber.org/news/nber-la...

Main takeaway: UI generosity modestly raises reservation & reemployment wages, but much of action is in increased collection of UI. This take-up margin dampens wage response. Policy levers on eligibility and costs of claiming and collecting UI benefits important, and interact with benefit levels.

We build a directed search model with endogenous take-up. Key insight: Higher generosity draws in lower-wage claimants, dampening the average wage response. In the absence of a collection margin, the wage response is stronger.

From CPS: • Reemployment wage premium for UI-eligible ≈ +9% vs. ineligible during expansions. • Take-up rate jumped from ~30% to ~40%, entirely due to higher benefits — not from changes in composition of unemployed or eligibles.

From BAM data we find: • Cross-section elasticity of reservation wages to UI is very small • Pandemic expansions raised reservation wages by only 8–12%. • Composition shifts: Relative to pre-pandemic, collectors were younger, nonwhite, and leisure/hospitality workers.

During COVID, UI generosity increased significantly ($600/$300 weekly supplements, plus expanded eligibility). A natural experiment to measure the pass-through from benefits to wages and who collects UI.

How do more generous unemployment benefits affect job search, reemployment wages, and the decision to claim UI benefits? We study this using detailed admin & survey data from BAM and CPS — and a directed search model with UI and endogenous take-up.

Hey #EconSky 📈📉
Excited to finally share this working paper with Roozbeh Hosseini and Martin Gervais.
"Unemployment Insurance, Wage Pass-Through, and Endogenous Take-up"
www2.census.gov/library/work...
A Short 🧵:

Changing Income Risk across the US Skill Distribution: Evidence from a Generalized Kalman Filter (Forthcoming Article) - For whom has earnings risk changed, and why? We answer these questions by combining the Kalman filter and EM-algorithm to estimate persistent and temporary earnings for every i...

Forthcoming in the AER: "Changing Income Risk across the US Skill Distribution: Evidence from a Generalized Kalman Filter" by J. Carter Braxton, Kyle Herkenhoff, Jonathan Rothbaum, and Lawrence Schmidt. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

I love economic history because for instance, you discover that a bicycle bubble happened in Great Britain during the 1890s

Will Tariffs Touch Off an Inflationary Impulse? Business Execs Think So. This Policy Hub paper uses survey data to explore tariffs' potential inflationary impact and how it could spill over beyond those firms directly affected.

A fun/important little piece with @AtlantaFed
colleagues. Our survey center asked firms how exposed their supply chain was to imports. More import-intensive firms expect to raise prices more *and* the more their competitors import,the more they'll raise.
www.atlantafed.org/research/pub...

Fall 2025 Midwest Macroeconomics Meeting The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland will host the Fall 2025 Midwest Macroeconomics Meeting on November 13-14, 2025. All conference activities will take place at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland...

reminder that midwest macro's submission deadline is coming up!

www.clevelandfed.org/events/2025/...

ROFL = Real Outliers Fatally Lanced
TLDR = Too Lazy; Didn't Research
SMH = So Many Hypotheses
BRB = Bayes ... Really, Bayes?
IMHO = Is My Hypothesis Obvious?
DND = Distribution Not Defined
FAFO = Fanciful Analysis of Four Observations
JC = Jointly Comical
NFI = Never Forget Independence

N = 16 workers

Workers were assigned to do multiple tasks

The authors don't cluster standard errors

I don't think we learn much from this study.

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers.

The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Rapid Response Data Briefing: American Time Use Survey. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. Did you know that the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) is up for renewal? Join us to learn: - What's in the ATUS? - Why is ATUS important? - What are the risks facing its continued collection and publi...

The American Time Use Survey is up for renewal, or cancellation.

OMB is gathering input on the data's importance.

@ipums.bsky.social organized a rapid response briefing to equip us with tools to effectively comment.
#EconSky #sociology #policysky

Register:
us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Eighteenth Annual Microeconomics Conference The Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Economics and the Tobin Center for Economic Policy at Yale University will host the 18th Annual FTC Microeconomics Conference on November 13 and 14, 2025 in

This is a really good conference put on by the Bureau of Economics of the Federal Trade Commission. Submit a paper for the program via the link below. #economics #antitrust #econsky www.ftc.gov/news-events/...

Just posted updated version of our DID textbook! We now have drafts of all chapters, including the one on general designs! Now you can tell your friends still on X that they are DID-outdated :-) Happy easter for those of you that celebrate it. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

The work is mysterious and important.

*Please repost* @sjgreenwood.bsky.social and I just launched a new personalized feed (*please pin*) that we hope will become a "must use" for #academicsky. The feed shows posts about papers filtered by *your* follower network. It's become my default Bluesky experience bsky.app/profile/pape...

Polls

538-style poll collection has now been recreated by a small group of fans and former staff. all fully transparent and public now. return of live public aggregation is imminent

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Forthcoming at the Journal of Political Economy: We find that consumer product markups increased more than 25 percent from 2006 to 2019.

One contribution is an approach to estimate IO-style models at scale, yielding flexible consumer preferences and estimates of marginal costs.

ESRC CASE PhD Studentship - Lancaster University

Looking to do a fully funded, policy-relevant PhD in economics?

The ESRC has funded another joint CMA PhD studentship, this time with Lorenza Rossi and Stefano Fasani at Lancaster University, on the interaction of market power, price setting and macro dynamics.

Please share widely and apply!

It's a very sad day. Just notified that @iza.org is closing its doors as of 31 December 2025. At a time when labor is under attack and technological change moves at an ever-faster pace, I can't help but think that this is a short-sighted decision. My heart goes out to those folks who work there.

🚀 Exciting Opportunity! 🚀
#AI keeps me up at night. What will happen to work & workers? 🤔
I'm partnering with Schmidt Sciences to offer up to $200,000 in funding for early-career researchers! 💡
🗓️ Apply by March 31 2025
🙏 spread the word!
🔗 Learn more & apply schmidtsciences.org/ai-at-work
#EconSky

Call for Papers! 4th DC Search and Matching will be 4/25-26. Submission deadline 3/10. Send us your papers! www.cvent.com/c/abstracts/...

Heads up for anyone interested in the labour market impacts of AI:

Anthropic has released new data mapping conversations with Claude onto occupational tasks.

Announcing the Data.gov Archive | Library Innovation Lab Today we released our archive of data.gov on Source Cooperative. The 16TB collection includes over 311,000 datasets harvested during 2024 and 2025, a complet...

We just launched a 16TB archive of every dataset that has been available on data.gov since November. This will be updated day by day as new datasets appear. It can be freely copied, and we're sharing the code behind it to help others make their own archives of data they depend on.

Spatial search This paper considers a random search model where some locations provide sellers with better chances of meeting many buyers than other locations (for e…

In NYC there is a shop selling cashmere sweaters for dogs, in Amsterdam there is a toothbrush shop. If you are a goth looking for a partner you should move to a city. Finally, there is a forthcoming JET paper explaining this www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Front page of the paper "The Evolution of US Retail Concentration" published in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2025. The Abstract reads: Increasing national concentration has contributed to market power concerns. Yet local trends are more informative about market power in retail, where consumers have traditionally shopped at nearby stores. Using novel product-level census data for all US retailers, we find that local and national concentration increased in parallel and affect most markets, products, and industries. The expansion of multimar- ket firms into new markets explains most of the increase in national concentration, with consolidation via increases in local market shares increasing in importance between 1997 and 2007. Increases in local concentration can explain one-quarter to one-third of the observed rise in retail gross margins.

Finally out in AEJ:Macro👉 The Evolution of US Retail Concentration w/@dominicsmith.bsky.social

Census data👉*National and local* concentration increased 1982-2012

Trends hold for product and industry markets

🔗https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20220249
@aeajournals.bsky.social