FEATURED POST
September 9, 2025
Behind the big picture
Last week’s economic data delivered new evidence that employment has slowed in 2025. But there’s more to the job market than the pace of hiring. Pay growth, hours worked, and productivity are combining to make the jobs picture more complex than the sum of its parts. Here is a look at how these three components operate in the background of the labor market and how they can shift the economic landscape.
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June 17, 2025
Where have all the workers gone?
Every now and then, it’s worth taking a break from rapidly changing economic developments to focus on long-term trends affecting the world of work. One long, slow change we’ve been living through for years is the evolution of labor market participation in the United States.
The unemployment rate grabs most of the attention every month as an indicator of the health of the labor market because it tells us how easy, or difficult, it is for people to find jobs.
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June 10, 2025
The big deal about small employers
Last week, ADP data showed that employers with fewer than 50 workers shed a large number of jobs—13,000—in May. While one month doesn’t make a trend, it does remind us of the big role small employers play in our economy. So, when it comes to the macroeconomy, what’s the big deal with small employers? Here are three reasons small businesses have an outsized impact on the U.S. labor market.
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May 28, 2025
“The Age of Work”, part two: The country’s youngest workforce
In the past two decades, the median age of workers in the United States has risen from 40.3 years to 42.4. It might not sound like a big change, but it’s having a big effect. This aging workforce is one reason the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that annual U.S. employment growth will slow to just 0.4 percent over the next decade, less than a third of the 1.3 percent annual growth recorded between 2013 and 2023.
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May 20, 2025
Boomerang hiring makes a comeback
The 2025 job market has been remarkably steady. Initial jobless claims are near historical lows, the unemployment rate is hovering just above 4 percent, and fewer people are quitting their jobs than before the pandemic.
The U.S. workforce is largely staying put, but one set of employees is on the move, and they’re returning to their previous employers.
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May 13, 2025
High-frequency smoke signals
The economy’s smoke signals are sending a confusing message about its health.
Growth slowed by 0.3 percent in the first three months of 2025. Yet in April, the economy produced a robust 177,000 jobs. Unemployment is steady, but in the first quarter, labor productivity contracted for the first time in three years. The pace of inflation, though slower than it was, is stickier than economists would like.
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May 6, 2025
The power and puzzle of productivity
This week, all eyes will be on Federal Reserve policymakers and their decision to cut, raise, or stand pat on interest rates. But there’s another data point that could have an even greater impact on the economic and inflation outlook for 2025: productivity.
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April 22, 2025
In full swing: What baseball and housing have in common
Baseball and the housing market have a couple of things in common. Both reach peak activity in the spring and both are tracked using a plethora of statistics. The granular details of RBIs, home runs, and at-bats are known to every diehard baseball fan. Housing’s copious data—sales both new and existing, starts, permits, and mortgage rates—make it the statistical envy of other sectors.
And just as a baseball team’s stats can foreshadow its win/loss record, housing stats tend to be a leading indicator of a market’s overall economic performance.
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April 15, 2025
Small business startups: The beat goes on. Or does it?
While market volatility dominated the headlines last week, small businesses quietly hit a milestone. Applications for new startups reached their second-highest level on record. Small businesses have long served as the backbone of U.S. employment. During the economic expansion that preceded the 2020 pandemic—at more than 10 years, it was the longest period of growth in U.S. history—small business created almost two-thirds of all new jobs.
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