With more data on hand, Brent and Steve take a second look at the effects of California’s minimum wage changes for limited-service restaurants. They dive deep into the theory, evidence, and consequences of the network of minimum wage policies in the state and try to see what story the data tells and if they’ve been wrong the whole time.

With the explosion of data collection, the growth of artificial intelligence, and accessibility of bad statistics, Nathan, Brent, and Steve thought it was necessary to talk about the future of data literacy with John Johnson, an expert on the ways people use, misuse, and abuse numbers in their every day lives.

Steve, Nathan, and Brent are joined by one of Steve’s co-authors, Carol Ma, to talk about a new solution they have developed for understanding significance within age discrimination contexts as well as the problems of trying to apply statistical tests where the assumptions of the test don’t match the parameters of the real world.

New Federal Reserve data on un- and underemployment raises questions about whether too many people are getting degrees they don’t need for the jobs they can get, so Steve, Nathan, and Brent are here to dig into the data and figure out whether this is a crisis in over-education or if everyone is reading the data wrong.

A new class of lower-cost alternatives to brand name drugs has emerged: biosimilars. With the development of new technology, we have new complications for antitrust litigation and to explore these issues and more Nathan, Steve, and Brent are joined by antitrust expert Catia Twal.

With the firing of the BLS commissioner in 2025 and continued issues with collecting macro data, a new NBER working paper “The Value of Reliable Statistics” by Bloom et al. tries to examine the importance of quality official statistics. And if someone is doing calculations, Steve, Nathan, and Brent are on it! In this episode they dig into the methodology and meaning of the 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. Will this slow rising education costs? Will this deter necessary higher education? Which types of education will see caps and why? This is everything you need to know and more!

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. To talk about this and other issues surrounding AI's use in hiring, Nathan, Steve, and Brent are joined by Allan G. King for his expert legal analysis.

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 in this episode that’s all about economic independence and what work makes you an employee.

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.