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The Economists in the Room

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At the Department of Labor, the World Bank, and the Federal Reserve, I was always surrounded by fellow economists. Each institution had plenty of us, often with comparable training and similar analytical tools . What set one economist apart from another was not necessarily their education but the perspective they brought to the work. I think this is an aspect of public service that economists sometimes undervalue. When everyone in a room has studied the same models, arriving at similar conclusions can become almost too natural. The real contribution of an individual voice is often the ability to recognize something others have overlooked. Same Training, Different Vantage Points A common educational background often produces similar ways of thinking. People who spend years working within the same institution can develop established habits, approaching certain problems through familiar and traditional methods. At the World Bank, I found that coming from outside the institution was partic...
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Still Low Hiring, Low Firing: What the September Jobs Report Reveals

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  The summer rebound now appears more modest than it did a month earlier, while hiring and quits have yet to show meaningful movement. At the beginning of the fall, I identified two important tests for the labour market. The preliminary benchmark revision on August 28 would help determine how much confidence to place in historical payroll figures. The August jobs report, scheduled for September 4, would indicate whether July’s weakness marked a turning point or merely a pause. I argued that another weak month would make the hiring freeze look less like a period of stability and more like a warning sign. Both tests have now taken place, and the September jobs report, released October 2, provides a third piece of evidence. Taken together, the results do not point toward a recovery. How Much of the Positive News Remained The August report initially suggested that the labor market might be turning a corner. Early estimates showed an increase of 162,000 payroll jobs, the strongest mont...
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What Giving People a Second Chance Really Takes

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Every few years, the same debate resurfaces. Governments use public funds to support training programs for people who left school early or lost their jobs, and someone questions whether that investment is worthwhile. The evidence is genuinely mixed, which helps explain why the debate has never reached a lasting resolution. I have devoted a considerable part of my career to studying this question. In a series of papers I worked on, we used experimental designs that randomly assigned individuals either to technical training or to a group that received no training, then tracked their outcomes over time. What we discovered changed my perspective. I would summarize the conclusion this way: the training itself is seldom the problem. The problem is expecting training to succeed by itself. Why I Chose to Study This Question I was born an American citizen, but I grew up in Colombia, where the conditions that later shaped my research were part of everyday life, not something I first learned abo...
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Measuring the Labor Market in a Decade of Shocks

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I recently delivered the keynote at the NBER Conference on Innovation in Measuring Employment, and International Business Times covered the talk https://www.ibtimes.com/adriana-kugler-what-americas-jobs-data-misses-how-fix-it-3807869 . I want to lay out the argument here in my own words because it gets to the heart of how economic policy decisions are made. Why timing matters more now Since 2020, the U.S. economy has faced a pandemic, disrupted supply chains , a war in Europe, tariff increases on a scale not seen since Smoot-Hawley, oil disruptions reminiscent of the early 1980s, and the emergence of AI. Any one of these developments would challenge policymakers. When they arrive on top of one another and in rapid succession, the speed and accuracy of the information we rely on become decisive. Yet the agencies responsible for producing official statistics are operating with fewer resources at the same time that private companies are collecting more data than ever before. What I learne...
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When a Quiet Labor Market Stops Working: Signs of a Deeper Freeze

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The employment report released on August 7 brought the risk I described in this space into much sharper focus. Payrolls fell by 23,000 in July. In absolute terms, that is a modest decline, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics rightly characterized it as little changed. But the revisions that came with the report matter more than the headline. May was marked down from 129,000 to 63,000, and June from 57,000 to 20,000. Together, those revisions removed 103,000 jobs from what we thought we knew about late spring and early summer. Over the past 12 months, payroll growth has averaged just 34,000 per month. The unemployment rate stood at 4.1 percent, essentially unchanged. On its own, a rate that low would ordinarily be reassuring. The difficulty is that it is being sustained by a labor market where very little is happening. In fact, the average number of people leaving the labor force over the past two years has reached 3.3 million per month, with about half leaving due to job-search burnout...
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When Pay Stops Keeping Up: The Growing Pressure on Real Earnings

How weaker wage growth, persistent inflation, and a cooling labor market are putting new pressure on household finances. Economic debate often revolves around two headline measures: inflation and unemployment . Both matter. But a third measure reveals something those numbers can miss: how workers actually experience the economy in everyday life. Lately, it has been sending a warning. That measure is real earnings: what a paycheck is worth after accounting for rising prices. Right now, that signal is far from reassuring. Why the Paycheck Number Can Be Misleading The number printed on a paycheck, nominal wages, has been rising. But a larger number only helps if it grows faster than the costs of groceries, gas, and rent. Real earnings strip inflation out of the picture and show what that paycheck can actually buy. When prices climb faster than pay, purchasing power falls, regardless of what the nominal wage figure says. This distinction is not abstract. Somewhere between 60 and 65 percent...
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Adriana Kugler: Why Central Bankers Must Look Beyond Home

Central bank mandates are built around domestic conditions. Yet the past decade has pushed global developments and geopolitical risk to the center of the conversation, and that changes how the job gets done.
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