Of Significance Podcast

In this episode the team digs into the methodology and meaning of a recent NBER working paper and have some suggestions for how they would run things if they were in charge of the BLS.

Nathan, Brent, and Steve are joined by Connor Moynihan to talk about the proposed changes to federal student loan caps for graduate education.

Employers are rolling out Large Language Models to take over their traditional hiring practices and this is creating opportunities for litigation up and down the hiring pipeline. 

The Department of Labor is proposing yet another rule change to classification of independent contractors and so Brent, Nathan, and Steve are here to make sense of what the criteria was, is, and will potentially be.

Inflation hits hard, but it can be tough to tell how hard because of how it’s measured, in this episode Brent, Steve, and Nathan talk about the problems when it comes to thinking about inflation and whether it can even be measured.

With the expansion of Large Language Models, Nathan, Steve, and Brent decided to take some time to look at how different jobs and career paths could be affected. Are we heading for a major crisis or is it overstated?

Nathan, Brent, and Steve talk about the prevailing wage, how it’s calculated, and why the statistics around it can dramatically change incentives and behavior. Brent finds a new way to rank himself.

This is the final episode in a series on Sports Statistics where Nathan, Steve, and Brent explore the mathematical thinking deployed by professional sports teams.

This is the second episode in a series on Sports Statistics where Nathan, Steve, and Brent explore the mathematical thinking deployed by professional sports teams as it pertains to momentum.

Nathan, Steve, and Brent explore the mathematical thinking deployed by professional sports teams. In this episode, they are joined by Sush Jain to finally figure out if the famous Hot Hand is a statistical reality or a mathematical myth.

Nathan, Brent, and Steve are joined by Chris Jones of Paul Hastings to discuss the new EU mandate on pay equity.

Nathan, Brent, and Steve wish the Stat Pack a happy holiday by going through Spotify Wrapped's calculation techniques and share some of their own data and Spotify ages.

It’s been a big year for Supreme Court cases, and in the Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services decision the Court reviewed the standards required in evaluating evidence of discrimination.

It's simple: celebrate with people you love! Steve, Nathan, and Brent have a Thanksgiving message for the whole Stat Pack!

Steve, Nathan, and Brent take a look at lost earnings in light of the Skaggs’ wrongful death litigation and talk about the considerations that have to be made when accounting for the but-for world.

Halloween is here, but are the job opportunities for recent graduates? Brent, Nathan, and Steve enter a veritable haunted house of data to make sense of Federal Reserve unemployment and underemployment numbers.

Federal law enforcement is in Washington, DC and with the city’s stats under the magnifying glass, Brent, Nathan, and Steve thought they should look into the numbers.

New numbers mean new analyses and Brent, Nathan, and Steve are here to talk about the Bureau of Labor Statistics major update this month. It’s as close to breaking news as they get with a dissection of how to think about these statistics, what the data is hiding, and the challenges the BLS will face going forward.

Nathan, Brent, and Steve explore how BLS numbers are collected, the problems people will make in interpreting them, and whether there’s cause for concern on the nature of data collection by the government going forward.

With the US getting ready to co-host the World Cup in 2026, Nathan, Steve, and Brent kick around some of the economic issues surrounding the World Cup and the countries that host it. But their roster isn’t complete without anti-trust expert (and soccer fan!) Sophie Meadows. 

With the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed, Nathan, Steve, and Brent look under the hood on one of the most discussed provisions relating to hourly workers: No Tax on Overtime.

When multinational companies move products within their organization and across borders, the value of production has to be considered for tax purposes. This might be fairly straightforward for a tangible good, but with intangibles? Well, that gets more complicated. So to investigate all of this, Brent and Steve talk with transfer pricing and anti-trust expert Dr. George Korenko about what matters in these calculations and why they’re important.

Tulsa, OK was one of the first cities to implement a program where they offer remote workers money to relocate to the city for a year in the hopes they can convince people to stick around longer and create economic growth. Thankfully, someone wrote a paper analyzing the impact of this policy so Steve, Nathan, and Brent decide to dig in on this episode.

Brent, Nathan, and Steve have been hearing about some major mergers in the news and want to understand who lets mergers happen, how they get approved, and the analytic questions that go in to thinking about potentially anti-competitive mergers. So they bring on mergers and acquisitions expert Dr. Craig Malam in this perfect blend of American and Australian thinking.