Owen Davis

Labor economics, demographics, technology. Senior economist at NYC Independent Budget Office. Mycophile.

[Owen Davis @odavis_]

Analysis from the Chicago Fed, which may or may not be the first time a Federal Reserve bank research product has used the word "vibes" https://t.co/et5YZeQXKo

[Owen Davis @odavis_]

Consumer spending and consumer sentiment used to be tightly coupled. That correlation crumbled post-2020.

[Owen Davis @odavis_]

From new NYFed research by @NataliaHEmanuel https://t.co/KFqaHpKwMb

[Owen Davis @odavis_]

Maybe early-career college-grad unemployment is being driven by WFH, not AI. "Employers may not want to hire fresh graduates onto distributed teams because it is more difficult to teach them the requisite skills from afar."

[Amanda Michaud @mander_michaud]

#QLmonthly May 2026: Labor market remains buoyant and stable.

📉 Layoffs re-approaching historic lows
📊 Quits stable — and clearly above 2025 levels
🔍 Job finding rates steady; non-participant finding rates at all-time highs

No red flags in the flows data. 1/n

[Florian Ederer @florianederer]

Large productivity gains from AI don't lead to equally big gains in software.

+40%/+140%/+180% commits from autocomplete/interactive/autonomous agents but only +50%/+30% projects/releases

And does this new software get used by consumers? Not really. It's invisible/irrelevant.

[Owen Davis @odavis_]

Not the first finding like this. Fits with view of AI as a "centralizing technology" as per @JerusalemDemsas https://t.co/MgOXUj4GF0

[Owen Davis @odavis_]

Unexpected finding: Chatting with LLMs in the midst of classic economic decision tasks (portfolio allocation, dictator game, etc) tended to depolarize people -- they moved *away* from their initial decisions. This despite AI sycophantically echoing users. https://t.co/GJiIrxW9Pe

[Owen Davis @odavis_]

@KolemanStrumpf They have an argument for why it takes time to accumulate and thus the stock variable is more significant than the flow variable. Agreed raw trends in fig 2 don’t make it super obvious, but does seem to be a shift between initially treated vs never treated post 2018.

[Owen Davis @odavis_]

legalized sports betting and divorce: probably what you expected

[Owen Davis @odavis_]

@BenFoldy “Hold em” actually refers to spouses

[Owen Davis @odavis_]

Working paper from Álvaro Muñiz Fernández, Brad R. Humphreys, and Jane E. Ruseski
https://t.co/AAbCgEcHVl

[Hunter📈🌈📊 @StatisticUrban]

Narrative violation: Gen Z has the highest consumer confidence. Gen X and Boomers are the pessimists.

I do feel that undercuts many of the material explanations for the vibecession, insofar as uniquely awful economic conditions for young people are a main driving force.

[Peter John Lambert @pj_lambert]

BUT when we control for WFH exposure, this effect all but disappears in our baseline results. This is NOT the case with WFH exposure, which is a robust predictor of the fall in junior-share of hiring with or without AI

[Peter John Lambert @pj_lambert]

Is GenAI causing the relative decline in early-career hiring? Our latest research finds that these effects may be conflated with another important driver: the rise of WFH arrangements (1/N)

[Owen Davis @odavis_]

@DanAlroyPhilo What is “tech” in 1900?

[Owen Davis @odavis_]

Odd fact of the economy: Many of our biggest living manufacturing firms were born around 1900, but that pattern doesn't show up in other sectors.

[Owen Davis @odavis_]

@ByrneHobart That is fascinating, love that theory

[Owen Davis @odavis_]

@andrewelrod This is the authors’ causal explanation. Yours is a good point but I think at the very high supersector level of aggregation the coding not as much of a concern.

[Owen Davis @odavis_]

https://t.co/xO87VvccD9