Adriana Kugler, the Georgetown University labor economist and former Federal Reserve Governor, has a simple test for what new economic data the United States should be collecting: ask which questions policymakers, businesses, and households need answered but cannot yet answer in a timely way. In her keynote at the NBER Conference on Innovation in Measuring Employment, she argued that the test points to four gaps in how the labor market is measured, and to a solution that combines public and private data rather than choosing between them.
"As a data nerd and policy wonk, nothing excites me more than talking about data and its implications for policy work," Kugler told the audience.
