Princeton Economics professor Ayşegül Şahin recently published a working paper with her co-author and frequent collaborator Bart Hobijn, “www.labormarketupdate.net,” which introduces a website of the same name that they created. The website delivers real-time analyses of the U.S. labor market, grounded in Şahin and Hobijn’s applied macro-labor research agenda.
Şahin and Hobijn set out to develop a tool to track labor market developments through the lens of a stylized labor-market cycle. “In 2007, at the onset of the Great Recession, we started to establish research-based measures to monitor the labor market,” said Şahin. “This research agenda, which we initiated almost 20 years ago, has developed over time, and we ended up writing many academic and policy-oriented papers along the way.”
Working on academic research requires reasonably current data, but the urgency is different from policy analysis, where timeliness is critical. As their measures gained wider visibility, they were increasingly asked for updates. “We, too, wanted to track what the most recent developments were telling us without going through old files every time we needed something.”
To solve the constant need for revision, Şahin and Hobijn decided to create a webpage that would provide real-time updates of the labor market indicators they had spent the past two decades developing. “We began by revisiting our papers and compiling a comprehensive list of the metrics we wanted to feature.”
In addition to content, they put significant thought into the design and user experience. “We both care a lot about the aesthetics of demonstrating economic content in different types of graphs and tables.” Hobijn, a skilled web developer, pushed the frontier in shaping the site’s aesthetics and functionality.
At its core, the website is intended to serve three purposes:
Labormarketupdate.net has forged a new and immediately essential tool for labor market research and education, paving the way for future developments.
“Building labormarketupdate.net felt a bit like going through old photo albums,” Şahin said. “Each graph reminded us of the labor market events, puzzles, and challenges the U.S. economy had faced. Some seem obvious in hindsight, while others still leave us puzzled.“
Ayşegül Şahin is a Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a research associate of the NBER Economic Fluctuations and Growth and Monetary Economics groups. She has been serving as the editor of the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics since January 2024. She is a member of the Panel of Economic Advisers of the Congressional Budget Office, the Executive Committee of the CRIW, and the Advisory Boards of the Dallas Fed, NY Fed, and the Carnegie-Rochester-NYU conference. Prior to joining Princeton University, she was the Richard J. Gonzalez Regents Chair in Economics at the University of Texas at Austin from 2018 to 2024. She worked as a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for fourteen years until 2018, where she founded and led the team that focused on the analysis of the U.S. labor market.
Şahin’s research focuses on the analysis of macro-labor issues such as maximum employment, unemployment, and labor force participation dynamics, labor market mismatch, estimation of the natural rate of unemployment, gender disparities and unevenness in labor market outcomes, wage and price inflation, and entrepreneurship. Her papers have appeared in various academic journals such as the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Monetary Economics, Jackson Hole Symposium, and Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, as well as in the media (The Economist, NY Times, Wall St Journal, Bloomberg, among others).
Şahin received her bachelor’s and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Rochester.