Shocking news.

The BLS is NOT postponing the monthly inflation report, the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Rather, the delay is for the annual Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX). CEX provides the "weights" for the CPI and other inflation measures.

Don't look now, but I expect calls for tax justice to grow louder here in America too.

Pope Leo XIV speaks out against wage inequality.

Not surprising, but still very important. www.reuters.com/world/us/fed...

Love it or hate it, this type of pressure on corporations to shape the contours of the market is something the left has wanted to do for a long time, but any actual attempt would have led to an uproar. Trump has been able to do it with relatively little uproar. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/u...

I lived in Seattle in 1991. When my kids ask me what I memories I have about music from my youth this is it.

“Smells Like Teen Spirit”, released as a single 34 yrs ago today “No one had any psychic foresight .. that the song would go on to do what it did,” said Grohl. “We just fuckin’ rocked it in a little rehearsal space that was like a barn. .. We just thought it was another cool song for the record.”

Alt title: Reimagine carbon based life forms demanding social security privatization

Here is a scary story: a two-sided Wile E. Coyote cliff. One is Trump policies: market may have under-priced costs. Another is AI: investors may have been overly optimistic. Correcting beliefs on one may lead to corrections in the other: with a scary multiplier.

a major concern coming out of the jobs report today is prime-age Black employment, which fell in 2025 these data are noisy and while it would be great if they turned around, I'm not optimistic: there will be downward pressure from federal job losses over the next few months

That quote below was from me, yesterday, expressing concerns about a slowdown in the labor market. Today's weak jobs report makes things worse. Here's why. 🧵

What does research say about minimum wages & employment? Three quarters of studies find small negative or positive effects New from the minimum wage own-wage elasticity repository: 97 studies, 78 published Median OWE: * all studies including narrow groups= -0.15 * overall low-wage workforce = 0.00

Maybe cancel the Nobel peace prize

The National Living Wage in UK aimed to get rid of low pay. It succeeded.

Hear me out: Blue books and in class exams are back, but let's be real: penmanship is so passé. I propose a disruptive, portable, innovation in classroom tech.

Paul Krugman and Arin Dube are on the same page. The Lisa Cook case is first and foremost about the rule of law. paulkrugman.substack.com/p/in-the-mat...

Some voices on the left and right have questioned central bank independence. Fair enough. Beyond inflation impact, there's also a matter of democratic principles. But arbitrary actions by an unchecked unitary executive can be deeply harmful for both independence and democratic accountability. 1/

This action by Lisa Cook is courageous, principled, and deserves broad support.

We either live in a country where the president is subject to the law or we don't.

This action by Lisa Cook is courageous, principled, and deserves broad support.

I think it's a mistake to think of the firing of Lisa Cook primarily in terms of Central Bank Independence, and its impact on the inflation rate. The most significant issue is also more basic: it's the rule of law.

Honestly, I have no idea how the markets will sort it out eventually. But here's the thing. No matter how the markets react, this is deeply troubling.

Seizing the commanding heights of the economy, all the while denouncing the scourge of socialism. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/t...

After a remarkable stretch when wage inequality fell substantially, wage growth at the bottom is now once again falling behind growth at the top. This is bad news for working class Americans. t.co/1hp5EE9up5

Trenchant analysis of the coming death of the VRA, and why it will still be critical for the future of American democracy.

Imagine an angry mob of economists.

Regardless of politics, economists should make clear: we do not condone reckless attacks on our statistical agencies, including by our fellow economists. The staff at these agencies work painstakingly to collect the data our democracy and economy depend on.

also a good one to read (which circulated for a while but just came out formally) as part of the catch-up, by @arindube.bsky.social and coauthors onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Statement from the largest economics association about the BLS firing As context: AEA approximately never makes such public statements This is a big deal

Thank you for your service.

It has been the honor of my life to serve as Commissioner of BLS alongside the many dedicated civil servants tasked with measuring a vast and dynamic economy. It is vital and important work and I thank them for their service to this nation.

Most regular folks don't wake up worrying about institutions. They have more immediate concerns. But once you live through a period when core institutions fail, you start paying attention, and historical memory is rebuilt for a time. We're going through one of those moments now.

I can't stress how damaging this is. Destroys trust in core government statistics.

Much respect for Suresh Naidu for this piece. It’s honest and insightful. And remarkably, I am sure it took courage to publish it.

A timely and trenchant piece by Suresh Naidu. When future generations sift through the wreckage of our era, they’ll find it strewn with the institutional and personal failures of leaders both great and small. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/o...

Very pleased that our local projections dif-in-dif paper is now out in the Journal of Applied Econometrics. Joint with @dgirardi.bsky.social, Jorda, and Taylor. It's a tool that we think many applied economists will find useful (indeed many already have). 🧵

Minimum wages increase pay, but what happens to employment? You can find estimates all over the map, but the median estimate is close to zero Over 70 percent of published studies find a small negative or positive effect for a given wage response

LP-DiD specifications can reproduce other recent DiD estimators (see @arindube.bsky.social's thread below). More in general, the LP-DiD framework can be tailored to specific settings, by properly writing the “clean control condition" that defines treated & control units. bsky.app/profile/arin...

Our Local Projections Difference-in-Differences (LP-DiD) paper is out in the Journal of Applied Econometrics. LP-DiD is a convenient, flexible and computationally fast framework for estimating DiD using simple well-specified regressions.... [1/4]

Nice unification of different DD estimators. Important feature: “all the estimators proposed in this paper allow for standard statistical inference using well understood techniques, already incorporated in common statistical software”

And a big update to the Stata package is also on the way!

Very pleased that our local projections dif-in-dif paper is now out in the Journal of Applied Econometrics. Joint with @dgirardi.bsky.social, Jorda, and Taylor. It's a tool that we think many applied economists will find useful (indeed many already have). 🧵

Economists argue for an American industrial policy to counter a China Shock 2.0. From @davidautor.bsky.social and Gordon Hanson. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/o...

A key finding in our paper: firms engage in considerable amount of "clunky" wage-setting not easily explained by optimizing behavior. Interestingly, the presence of monopsony power helps explain why: monopsony dulls the loss in profits from making errors in wage setting.

Session 2: Employer power in low wage labor markets (chaired by Todd Sorensen), with @sydneecaldwell.bsky.social, @arindube.bsky.social, and Suresh Naidu

#EconSky: Last chance to register for virtual attendance at Friday's Minimum Wages and Monopsony Conference, featuring an all-star line of labor economists. Learn more and register: irle.berkeley.edu/events/minim...

We are delighted to continue our Handbook Masterclass Series this week with Attila Lindner and @arindube.bsky.social talking about minimum wages in the 21st century. t.co/twYFTO6iaR

The ML to AI timeline. 2015: gotta learn python 2025: AI has given us python4all! 2030: WTF is python