Preston Mui

New data from December shows a labor market that remains strong all-around even as wages have begun to decelerate. The unemployment rate ticked down from 3.6% to 3.5%, while prime-age employment increased from 79.7% to 80.1%. The establishment survey continued to show growing employment, but at

The Fed says that the labor market needs to cool in order to bring inflation down. A key part of the case for maintaining the current pace of rate hikes is built on high measures of wage growth. Jay Powell cited the last average hourly earnings figure as one sign

As Congress considers a year-end spending bill, it faces a decision that will have a meaningful effect on inflation: whether or not to extend across-the-board Medicare reimbursement rates.

Overall the labor market data from November show a mixed picture, with the establishment survey showing resilience even as the household survey signaling a slowdown.

A Labor Supply Shock? Much ado has been made about the shortfall in the headline employment-to-population ratio and the headline labor force participation rate of late. Many have claimed that recent wage and price pressures trace back to  a “labor supply shock”. Some have even tried to make the more

This is the second piece of our vacancies series. In this piece, we refute specific vacancy-backed arguments that the Federal Reserve will need to engineer a recession in order to bring inflation under control.

The Federal Reserve has given job vacancy data center stage in assessing the strength of the labor market. The theoretical and empirical issues with vacancies data show that this is a mistake.

When we disaggregate the aggregate inflation statistics, we find that the sources of high inflation in the US and Europe are different.