Erika McEntarfer
@ErikaMcentarfer
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Labor economist * Commissioner @BLS_gov * formerly @WhiteHouseCEA , @uscensusbureau , @USTreasury * MAC-en-tar-fur * personal account - all opinions my own.
Washington, DC
Joined September 2017
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Last Seen Profiles
For new followers who are curious, I will tease one more graph from our paper in progress, showing the enormous dispersion in earnings for graduates of top schools and the earnings gap between graduates of top 5/top 20/non-top 20 programs in academia (1/3)
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Economists seem to have two paths to becoming economists:
(a) my parent(s) is an economist
(b) it was a complete and utter accident, I had no idea economics was something I would be interested in until X happened.
Agree. I decided to get a PhD in economics while I was working as an RA at the Boston Fed, and discovered what cool work Fed economists do.
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One of the most interesting things about the economics profession is that almost 50% of new PhDs do not go into academia and yet the profession does comparatively little to prepare students for these jobs.
Where do those economists work? A thread:
So one thought I had was maybe students could benefit from larger exposure to economics careers in tech. No doubt many students know abt that career but I still wonder if we over estimate how much students truly know abt those routes. Maybe it’s the perfect career for them.
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Did the pandemic force many workers into early retirement? Can we expect older workers to return to the labor market when the pandemic is over? New working paper🧵
Labor force participation workers 55 and older:
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Twitter today making me anxious about getting into graduate school good thing I thought ahead and got a PhD before the internet
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New paper using LEHD linked to productivity data is out. Key findings: (1) high-productivity firms grow faster by drawing workers away from other firms, (2) this reallocation collapses in recessions, yielding a sullying effect. A thread:
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When Amazon opens a warehouse, the QWI turnover rate in the local warehousing industry rises 30% on average, and sometimes much higher
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Did not intentionally write a paper on career ladders in economics to attract hundreds of new PhD candidate followers on Twitter to tell them how great CES is and they definitely should consider applying here, but a silver lining is a silver lining so
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Let me tell you what we have learned in the last five years about the cyclicality of hiring from the U.S. linked employer-employee data, a thread. 1/N
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@TrevonDLogan
I look at these 'how to get into a top Ph.D. program in economics' threads and worry we've effectively removed from that pipeline anyone who doesn't know exactly what steps to take from age 15 to 25 to get there.
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@vhranger
is the basic criticism here that they hired python programmers instead of statisticians? Wondering because I've noticed data science job ads emphasize programming languages more than statistical training, seems like the later is more fundamental and harder to learn on the job
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Almost 55% of workers with a college degree have been able to telework during the pandemic, compared to 5% of workers with less than a HS education.
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I write a lot about job-to-job flows, but this one is more personal: tomorrow is my last day at the Center for Economic Studies
@uscensusbureau
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Judy Chevalier (Yale SOM) on what fed economists can do to increase diversity: ‘Government economists have some of the most interesting jobs in the profession. They should talk to more young people about what they do’.
#EconDiversity
Here are some highlights of new Hutchins Center report on gender and racial diversity of federal govt's economists (including those at the Fed)
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Dog decided she would join NBER-SI today and if I moved to the left this is what would have been on camera.
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Actually less than half of recent PhDs in economics ended up in academia.
Consulting firms, banks, tech jobs, Rand/Mathematica type places, the Fed Board and regional banks, IMF, Treasury, Census/BLS/BEA ... lots of good outside options for economics PhDs.
My neoliberal take on getting a Ph.D. in economics is that it is incredibly irrational and that you should only get one if you are an irrational person who would refuse to accept anything but being a professor as a career
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@zeynep
@kareem_carr
True, I'd add:
All other social sciences -> Economics
Economists are all about internal warfare:
Macroeconomists <--> Microeconomists
Theory <-----> Empirics
Structural estimation <----> Reduced form
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My new working paper with Andre Kurmann is up. We use administrative data to investigate the extent and consequences of wage rigidity in the Great Recession.
🚨New CES Working Paper🚨 "Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity in the United States: New Evidence from Worker-Firm Linked Data" by André Kurmann &
@ErikaMcEntarfer
#CensusResearch
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To this thread full of good advice on navigating the non-R1 market I will add that candidates not targeting top-50 depts who prefer research to teaching should strongly consider research jobs in the public sector.
The econ job market is starting again. Just a minor advice thread, specifically aimed at people in the academic market who are not superstar candidates. IMO too much of the advice is aimed at people who are heading towards a job at an R1.
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How do veterans fare in the labor market after military service? New experimental data on employment
and earnings for veterans by military occupation is released today, through partnership with
@USArmy
and
@uscensusbureau
.
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@EmilyNix100
You might want to split the positives and negatives into (a) decision to pursue a PhD (b) decision to go into academia. Most PhDs don't end up in academia
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Ph.D. program rank matters outside of academia too, but the gaps are smaller, and there's generally less dispersion (3/3)
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This chart shows how non-academic placements for economists are distributed across sectors and how this has changed over time.
Tech has grown as a share of initial placements, but remains a small share (gov't and consulting share of placements are larger and increased by more)
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I've been joking for years that it seems like every other economist you meet has a college professor parent but did not realize what an outlier economics was in this respect
Key stylized fact:
Amongst US-born PhDs, Economics is less socioeconomically diverse than *all* the major PhD fields, including math, computer science, physical and biological sciences, and other social sciences.
(3/N)
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Industry coding nerd post: I’m constructing a composite NAICS of ‘tech’ firms to look at economists’ career ladders and it is the weirdest composite ever: software developers, e-retail, and taxi companies, it’s a real puzzle figuring out what fits
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Nice to see someone using our J2J data to make this point - we created it for exactly this kind of analysis
Employees at small businesses are increasingly making career-ladder moves to higher-paying jobs with more upward mobility at larger firms—part of the reason you're hearing labor complaints from small businesses is that they're getting out-competed on wages and labor productivity.
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I'm working on a new paper on recessions and retirement and honestly the wave of older workers leaving the labor market in 2020 is just enormous.
The worker profiled here is 67 but most are far younger, late 50s and early 60s
Opinion | The Great Resignation is also the Great Retirement of the baby boomers. That’s a problem. via
@helaineolen
@washingtonpost
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'Unretirements' do increase slightly when macroeconomic conditions improve, but the cyclical effect is very small compared to flows into retirement, again suggesting most excess retirements in recessions become permanent.
Link to the paper here:
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In short, it's great that those training the next generation of economists are paying more attention to what kinds of work economists do outside of academia. But it's more than just tech!
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I am so excited to see Nick using our Job-to-Job Flows data!
(It was four years of blood, sweat, and tears to bring it to life, and it is great to watch the user base grow.)
Everything you always wanted to know about job switching, by
@nick_bunker
-- new today from the Hiring Lab.
The State of Job Switching and Hiring
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10 years into their careers, the median graduate from a top 5 Ph.D. program working in academia earns almost twice what a graduate from a school outside the top 20 makes (ranks are from REPEC). But dispersion in outcomes for top graduates is large (2/3)
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@DanielBZhao
Both of these things are true:
- most job separations are to nonemployment
- job separations are procyclical
Job switching is *very* procyclical, so it drives the cyclicality in separations even though it's not the majority of separations.
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So why does tech have such an outsized role in our conversations about economists?
There are likely lots of reasons for this, but one might be that tech placements have increased *a lot* at top programs, going from near zero 10-12 years ago to 9% of recent placements
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Considering retweeting this every time someone asks me why we can’t assign unemployment status with administrative data.
Almost 80% of the unemployed who had worked in the last 12 months had not applied for UI benefits...and of those it was mostly because they assumed they were not eligible
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Just realized the AEA climate survey is not actually a survey on my views about global warming.
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The times I’ve been invited to give seminars at universities, I get many questions from graduate students about how I found my job, how much I like my job, or how they could get a similar job.
I don't know whose department needs to hear this, but if you're not inviting occasional speakers who left academia and 👏 are 👏 happy 👏, you're abusing your students.
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Seasonal adjustment models are boring statistical agency esoterica until you are trying to interpret trends in a pandemic that has it's own influence on seasonality.
SA models are great but they depend critically on stable seasonal patterns in the data
Note that the weak hiring in September is partly the result of a big decline in public education. Possible that reflects seasonal-adjustment oddities related to the pandemic, as flagged by
@BLS_gov
in their news release.
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@causalinf
In a seminar I asked if the speaker could pause and explain a confusing graph and they said no and flipped past it, I'm still mad about it years later
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So glad this paper is out in time for the job market - see Dani's thread for a great summary of our main findings
#CensusResearch
in Journal of Economic Perspectives "Early Career Paths of Economics Inside and Outside of Academia" by Lucia Foster(
@Lucia_Econ
), Erika McEntarfer (
@ErikaMcentarfer
), and Danielle H. Sandler
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I talk with journalists all the time who are using our data for stories and want confirmation from an expert that they are using the data correctly. There are lots of smart economists at the stat agencies happy to help you get the analysis right.
So second: Run your findings past people! Don't assume your usual editorial processes will work with more data-heavy stories. Find people who understand the subject you're writing about (ideally, the specific dataset you're writing about) and talk to them throughout the process.
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Geographical expansion of Census research centers (FSRDCs) boosted researcher productivity and improved policy relevance of research - not at all surprising but great to see empirical validation of years of hard work expanding access to data by Census
🚨🚨 Working Paper Alert! 🚨🚨
Excited to share new
@nberpubs
WP with
@MTranchero
-- we examine the impact of access to confidential admin data via
@uscensusbureau
data centers on economics research.
A short 🧵 with key findings ...
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Most interviewed have jobs, but can’t find better jobs.
When we were developing Job-to-Job Flows someone asked me, “Why should I care if people with jobs can’t find jobs? Why not just focus on the unemployment rate?”
This is why:
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Should we expect these older workers to return to the labor market at a later date? I don't find much evidence for optimism here: LEHD flows suggest retirement is quite sticky, 70% of older workers who enter a retirement spell never work substantially again
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One of the advantages of being an economist at a stat agency that you are required by the nature of your work to collaborate with geographers, statisticians, computer scientists, and sociologists.
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We are currently working on a Census/Army project on employment outcomes for Army veterans entering the labor market - matching 16 years of Army records with our national database of jobs (LEHD).
Outcomes are super interesting! Can’t wait to tweet about it when released.
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I’m pretty bummed that I’ll be seeing my awesome colleagues a lot less and instead be working alongside these much more disruptive and frankly super lazy office-mates here.
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Are these better-paying firms also the larger employers in the economy? Surprisingly, not really - that better paying firms are larger appears to be true in tradable sectors, but not services. Maybe that isn't so surprising, but it wasn't what we expected. 4/N.
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@m_heggeness
I once got a call from someone who claimed to be collecting data for Census. I said, “funny, I’m actually sitting in my office at the Census Bureau” and they hung up.
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@ernietedeschi
Use the Census Job-to-Job Flows data instead. Here is a graph of job switching rates by age since 2000. Note the strong recovery in job switching - especially among young workers - after the Great Recession, consistent with the rise in quits in JOLTS.
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Nice to see WSJ using Census Job-to-Job Flows data to look at job switching.
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Coefficients from cyclical regressions suggest the pandemic recession increased the retirement rate by an excess 5 percentage points, a much larger impact than the Great Recession on flows into retirement
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Who are these workers moving up the job ladder in expansions? Not surprisingly, they tend to be young. They also tend to be less skilled. And when the job ladder collapsed in the recession, they lost those jobs or got stuck at low-paying firms. 5/5
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I’ve been spending so much time at home with the dog she is starting to imitate me.
#ShutdownStories
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@BarbaraBiasi
Pretty much the entire public sector in the US, including the military and the postal service
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@EmilyNix100
Start year of three papers I am finalizing right now: 2015, 2013, and (gulp) 2007
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@aaronsojourner
@arindube
@john_voorheis
@ElizaForsythe
That looks to me like a large retailer not reporting/under-reporting UI wage records for two quarters. The QWI imputation model fills in one-quarter reporting holes but not (far less frequent) two-quarter holes
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Nice WaPo article looking at new data on COVID impact on businesses and households released by the Fed and Census this week.
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In expansions, lower-paying firms lose so many workers to job-hopping that they would actually shrink (quite a bit) in expansions. But they don't, because instead they increase hiring from the pool of unemployed. 3/N.
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Seeking input from the hive mind: if I had longitudinal data on earnings and employers for Ph.D. economists working in the U.S. what statistics would you be most curious to see?
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In our papers on this topic, we call this phenomenon the 'cyclical job ladder'. As churn increases in expansions, more workers move up the job ladder, increasing hiring at the 'bottom' rung of the ladder (unemployment).
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My first AEA meeting in 9 years not recruiting. I’m planning to enjoy myself and see lots of great papers.
#ASSA2019
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@NikhilBasavappa
Something you think you understand until you encounter time-series business data
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New puppy day one: oh so cute
New puppy day eight: oh my god I ruined our lives
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I just want an AI that can schedule a meeting between four busy coauthors who cannot view each other’s calendars
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@marthagimbel
Little known fact: only about 30 percent of federal employment is in DC/MD/VA. DoD, VA, and SSA especially have employees all over the country, but there’s also the Park Service, national labs, hurricane center, etc. Most states have at least 1% Fed employees.
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Super interesting paper and great thread summarizing the main findings.
What do we know about occupational mobility in the US?
As you may know, there isn’t very good existing data on it.
So
@gregorschub
,
@Bledi_Taska
& I construct new occupational mobility data, using an amazing new data set of 16 million U.S. resumes from
@Burning_Glass
. [1/N]
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@kevinrinz
@WhiteHouseCEA
I'm devastated the continued exodus of econtwitter to the CEA now includes one of our own.
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@ChloeEast2
I shouldn't have been surprised there was so much dispersion in salaries and yet I was
For new followers who are curious, I will tease one more graph from our paper in progress, showing the enormous dispersion in earnings for graduates of top schools and the earnings gap between graduates of top 5/top 20/non-top 20 programs in academia (1/3)
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@nikir1
Because we haven't written it yet! We are working on the paper now, results just got out of disclosure so are just seeing the light of day
We can't see teaching loads in our data, but the program rank premium grows larger over time in academia, but not in industry jobs
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@footeball45
The forced idleness really is hard. I planned better this time than in 2013 (keeping busy with a mix of research and household projects) but it is still hard. Not ready for retirement yet, clearly.
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First, it is definitely true that in expansions, lower-paying firms struggle to hire and fill vacancies. That's partly because their quits rise in expansions due their workers job-hopping to better paying employers. 2/N
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@ChristianPeel
We are talking to NCSES about using SED/Census linked data to look at longitudinal outcomes for Ph.D.s in all fields. (We started with exploratory analysis for economists because that is obviously the field we know best)
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@jenniferdoleac
I am so sorry folks I would rather be cold than do interviews with jet lag. If we decouple the job market from the conference maybe I'd get to see the world outside of the hotels at one of these things and it would make a difference.
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Are there any guides on establishing a code management plan for multi-author empirical papers? I'm creating a replication archive for a working paper and thinking (again) about the disadvantages of having each author go their own way on software, code documentation, etc
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Skills you acquire in these collaborations are really useful: seasonal adjustment, imputation/adjustment models, geo data quality and editing, disclosure avoidance: all important things to understand when interpreting data as well as generating it
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Also I will be extremely on-brand and end this thread with a picture of Pundit and her reaction to our results.
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"Surprisingly, we find that both between-workplace inequality and between-occupation inequality have stayed roughly level over the past 20 years...The big change has been in the covariance between occupation and workplace premiums, which has doubled in the past 20 years"
We fit the first two-way occupation by workplace wage model on US data, so we can get at occupation pay premiums, net of workplace effects and workplace premiums net of occupation composition. (2/10)
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This job ladder moving workers to more productive firms collapses in recessions. In the Great Recession, the growth advantage of high-productivity firms is instead due to fewer worker separations to nonemployment.
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@nick_bunker
Putting in a plug for Census: In the Job-to-Job Flows data, you can calculate what share of job leavers leave the sector. Generally speaking, it is about half.
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@chloergibbs
@WhiteHouseCEA
I can report that after a week I can now go a whole hour without trying to check my CEA phone. Was great working with you this year!
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@marthagimbel
I once had a long back and forth with our public information office, which kept changing ‘not employed’ to ‘unemployed’ and complained every time I changed it back that ‘unemployed’ sounded better.
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@DavidAJaeger
I’ve been demand side almost every year for a decade and the incidence of co-authored JMPs has definitely increased.
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@AbigailWozniak
Exactly. My short talk intro template:
(1) Why is this issue important
(2) What we already know
(3) What is the specific contribution of this paper
(4) What I find
In very short talks this can be covered in just 2 slides. But you need to discuss 2 to give 3 & 4 context
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@jodiecongirl
Furloughed economist here: can confirm economics training pretty useless right now. I’m giving to the local food pantries and volunteering to clean up the parks.
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I find that retirements spike during economic contractions, with a 1% point increase in the UI rate increasing retirement rate by 0.16-0.22 percentage points on average (cyclical effect increases with age, decreases with income).
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@arpitrage
I think you are right, but the data suggest shift in initial placements, not senior moves (which are almost zero). Could reflect preferences but also wonder if there's a demand-side story there (other than top people is industry interested in poaching senior academics?)
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An example: once we received data suggesting a massive job destruction following a natural disaster. But the size of the event didn't match survey data immediately following the event, which suggested much smaller impact. So we held off publishing the statistics.
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@DavidWiczer
@Susi_ATL
Don’t let the pre-doc conversation bring you down. Working as a field economist is extremely useful experience prior to getting an PhD. Understanding economic data and how it is generated is professional knowledge that sadly most programs don’t teach.
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I use large changes in LEHD earnings to identify entry into partial (P) or full retirement (R) from full-time work (F). These retirement flows peak at age 62 with a second peak at age 65. By age 62 half of attached workers are no longer working full-time
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Veteran Employment Outcomes data show what kinds of military jobs can translate into a well-paying career after service. Top earning occupations include military intelligence, drone operators, and cyber occupations.
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Obviously a big move, and I am very excited to begin. Per my ethics briefing, this account will remain a personal one. But I look forward to meeting many more of you in person, which is my preferred medium really.
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I am slightly disappointed there was no dog-sled leg of this trip.
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@mwanamak
I cannot imagine trying to convince small children that economics is interesting, having failed to convince my parents
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