Challenge
Studying labor data to improve procedure and policy
With the constantly changing U.S. labor market and abundance of data in the market across different segments of the workforce, policymakers and business leaders look for a few specific indicators as measures of labor market strength. As it stands, most existing labor market indices are constructed at the national level focusing on a few metrics. The few indices that do provide more details measure either the overall performance for major metro areas or selected aspects of a local economy. Although data science has now helped scientists to start studying the labor market in new ways, much has yet to be explored.
Up until 2014, there was no comprehensive index that measured labor market dynamics at the industry, macro and regional levels, no existing indices to assess the labor market performance in intricate detail and no benchmark to measure human capital management for individual firms.