FEATURED POST
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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February 10, 2025
January job reports are different. Here’s why.
Every job report is important to economists, but the January releases stand apart. Not only do they set the tone for the year, they also introduce annual technical adjustments and benchmarking, which affects employment estimates all year.
Got questions? Here are some answers about January job reports.
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January 27, 2025
The age of work
The United States is getting older, and its workforce is aging, too. This week, ADP chief economist Nela Richardson teams up with Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace to explore what this massive demographic shift might mean for the economy and the workplace.
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January 21, 2025
Skills in the Era of AI and Aging
Last week, I wrote about the skills opportunity uncovered by ADP research. However, within that opportunity there lies a paradox. In today’s workplace, skills are being created and retired simultaneously, at rapid rates. How can skills evolution be jumping forward and falling behind at the same time? The answer lies in two megatrends which will reshape the workforce of the future: aging demographics and rapid-fire innovation.
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January 13, 2025
The skills opportunity
Job reports move markets because they’re the strongest signal economists have about the strength of the U.S. economy. But worker productivity is just as important to economic growth; it’s just harder to measure or capture.
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December 16, 2024
Word of the year: Stability
The path to becoming a Merriam-Webster or Oxford word of the year differs, but the goal of each is the same: To capture society’s mood or ethos over the past 12 months. In keeping with the spirit of these annual pursuits, I’ve come up with my own word to describe the vibe of the 2024 labor market: Stability. Here’s why stability wins the word of the year for me, and why its days as an apt description of the labor market are numbered.
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December 9, 2024
A labor market riddle
This week, economists will try to fit fresh inflation data into the riddle of the year-end labor market. To be successful, they’ll need to square the conflicts of the last jobs report: Strong hiring accompanied by rapid wage growth and slightly higher unemployment.
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November 25, 2024
The inflation Grinch
This week marks the official kickoff of the holiday season. In any given year, about 20 percent of annual retail sales are wrapped up in the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Years Day. The National Retail Federation expects 2024 to deliver the strongest holiday shopping season on record. Consumers are projected to increase their spending by more than $25 per person to a total of $902, $16 higher than the previous record set in 2019.
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November 19, 2024
Flipping the housing-labor dynamic
By most accounts, the U.S. economy is doing well. Last week, we learned that inflation is rising more slowly than it was a year ago, and consumers are continuing their brisk spending. Lurking beneath this upbeat data, however, is housing, which continues to put a squeeze on the economy.
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