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David Munro

@dmunro.bsky.social
179 followers 69 following 97 posts

Academic Economist, Middlebury College

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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
Finished a fun short paper looking at early warning signs of recessions, focusing on unemploy. claims data. Claims often to signal downturns earlier, particularly initial claims (i.e. displacements). Project digitizes weekly claims data back to 1940s, hope others can use it! doi.org/10.1016/j.ec...
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
On the demand side, we leverage a Redfin dataset that tracks the share of new purchases from "investors" (e.g. buyer had LLC in their name), and find that the share of purchases from investors was lower in Minneapolis (relative to other metros) in the post-reform period.
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
On affordable housing, the 2040 plan incentivized affordable housing creation via tax incentives and financing. We see stronger affordable housing creation, notably in the most affordable category (<31% Area Median Income), relative to other cities/townships in the region.
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 24/11/2025
Thanks for the update! Weird that the numbers between you and Cawley are so different. Some single postings seem to be posting for multiple position... but I would be surprised if this accounts for the difference (maybe save, e.g., central banks hiring many?) Here are two examples:
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
And the Insured Unemployment Rate ticked up slightly to 1.26%. Overall unemployment picture during the shutdown points towards a gradually weakening labor market. Hopefully signing off! 🫡 @josephpolitano.bsky.social @estruby.bsky.social
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
Initial Claims (week ending Nov. 8th) up 12k or 5.6% (SA) and up 22k or 10% (NSA).
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
Since we don't yet have new official claims data, my last (?) rogue report (I missed last week!), for week ending Nov. 1st. CC increased 20k (SA) or 7k (NSA) last week.
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
And the Insured Unemployment Rate ticked up slightly: 1.24 to 1.26% over the week. @josephpolitano.bsky.social
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
Initial claims down slightly: 3k or 1.4% (NSA), 3k or 1.6% (SA). Thus, the rise in insured unemployment likely driven from lower job finding (people hanging out in the claims pool longer) not new layoffs.
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
Week #5 Rogue Unemployment Report, Halloween Edition 🎃 (hoping we won't have a Christmas Edition...). Data up to week ending Oct. 18th. Insured Unemployment ticked up slightly: +34k or 2.2% (NSA), +28k or 1.5% (SA)
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 24/10/2025
New this week, Insured Unemployment Rate (CC/cov. emp.) (worth noting cov. emp. is, by construction, a pretty lagging measure of employment). Stayed relatively constant week-to-week (around ~1.25%), but has been trending upwards over the past year. @josephpolitano.bsky.social @mchinn.bsky.social
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 24/10/2025
Initial Claims also pretty steady: -5k or -2.7% (NSA). -8.5k or -4% (SA).
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 24/10/2025
Week #4 Rogue Unemployment Report (compiled from state data). Insured Unemployment relatively steady (+18k or 1.2% (NSA). -6k or -0.3% (SA). (excl. CO, MA, TN, not reported yet)
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 17/10/2025
Initial claims (again, excl. AZ, MA, NV, TN), ticked up: increased 12.5K (SA), or about 6% increase, but nothing too crazy. @josephpolitano.bsky.social we're not totally in the dark about the US labor market!
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 17/10/2025
Week #3 Rogue Unemployment Report: Insured unemployment (Continued Claims) (excl. AZ, MA, NV, TN: not reported yet) declined by 8k (SA), so pretty steady.
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
And here's the same for initial claims. Again, relatively steady.
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
My second rogue jobs report (compiled from state claims). Here's insured unemployment (excl. HI and MA (no release yet)) and NSA and SA (weekly SA is giving me a bit of a headache, but anyway). Not much change.
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
I'm going rogue! Looks like state-level claims data is still being updated on FRED (7 hrs ago). I think this is because it's produced by states, and not the ETA. All states have new data, except AZ and MA. Below is the updated (NSA) insured unemployment series aggregated (minus AZ and MA).
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 24/09/2025
@stlouisfed.bsky.social Modest suggestion for FRED: can you add a sort by "time series length" option? When teaching I often like to show long time series. When I sort by "observation start" I often have to wade through pages of time series that start early but end in, e.g., 1948.
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
We don't find evidence of an increase in housing supply (building permits). If anything, the data suggests a relative decline in building permits. (Possible cause was legal dispute on 2040 plan in 2023/24). Regardless, housing prices declined without a noticeable supply increase.
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
The effects for Minneapolis are quite significant. Here's the placebo test for rental prices (similar for home prices):
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
The results from the synthetic control are robust to different criteria for cities in the donor pool: Midwest cities only, <1 million population, similar income levels, similar post covid population growth:
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
And rental prices:
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
🚨 Excited to share a new working paper with an exceptional former student of mine, Helena Gu. The paper looks at the impact of one of the largest zoning reforms in US history: the Minneapolis 2040 plan. We find significant impacts on home prices: (1/N) ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/glodps...
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 16/04/2025
For all the admins hand-wringing about trade deficits, they are currently blowing a hole in one of the US's largest export categories: Tourism (~10% of total exports, ~25% of service exports). Of course, it's not really about trade deficits, but anyway...
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 18/02/2025
We plot average inflation computed using different trailing windows, from 1 to 6 years. The 1 and 2 year windows exceed 2% before Q4 2021, suggesting they are too short. All of the 3-5 year windows cross 2% in Q4, while the 6 year window crosses after. Suggesting an implicit window of 3-5 years. 4/
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 18/02/2025
In the paper we document an abrupt abandonment in AIT framing of the Fed's inflation objectives in Q4 2021 across various mediums of Fed communication. 3/
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 17/02/2025
A proper winter day in VT!
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 12/11/2024
Yes, important to be clear, but I don't see overwhelming evidence of that argument in the data. I think the growth rates, and including the pandemic recovery, biases his numbers. It's hard to argue that real wages in 2012-2020 were higher than they are now. We can argue about sub-groups, but still.
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 12/11/2024
"In no part of the income distribution did wages grow faster while Biden was President than they did 2012-2020." 🤨 2012-2020 wage growth never breached 4%, while it's been above 4% for the majority of the post 2020 period. Maybe he's talking about real wages, but probably want to be clear on that.
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 09/11/2024
In the election post-mortem and the conversation about economic dissatisfaction, I'll throw in one interesting observation from my work (w/ Oleg Korenok). Attention to inflation has been much slower to return to pre-pandemic levels relative to actual inflation. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 07/11/2024
We also document an increase in what we consider more ambiguous target language like "over time" and "sustainably", which could be interpreted in different ways. Here's the share of this ambiguous language from the speeches. Somewhat noisy, but most consistent usage post-2022. (5/7)
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 07/11/2024
We start by coding the inflation target language as explicit average inflation targeting (AIT) or references to their "longer-run" objective. Here's the share of inflation target references in FOMC speeches in these categories, with PCE inflation. (2/7)
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David Munro @dmunro.bsky.social · 12/11/2023
As a Canadian I can say with a high degree of confidence that the American version of ketchup chips is very toned down... my fingers are not nearly red enough!
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