Using the LSAT as a labor market thermometer for lawyers

We rely upon a 50-state, 20-year panel to find that the number of Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) takers is only loosely related to economic conditions—although slightly more for men than for women, who in 2020 accounted for 58% of all LSAT takers. The number of test takers rose more than 35% between 2014 and 2020. This wave accentuated an already existing downtrend in the median real income of lawyers, and thus provides support for the hypothesis that most states have more lawyers than they need.     

Macroeconomic forecasting in times of crises

We propose a parsimonious semiparametric method for macroeconomic forecasting. Based on ideas of clustering and similarity, we partition the series into blocks, search for the closest blocks to the latest block of observations, and forecast with the matched blocks. In a real-time forecasting exercise, we show that our approach does especially well for labor market and other key macro variables. Our method outperforms parametric linear, nonlinear, time-varying, and combination forecasts for the period 1999–2015 and particularly in the Great Recession. When adding financial spreads, our method delivers further improvements for labor market variables and capacity utilization.     

Crowdfunding: a bibliometric analysis

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - This paper presents a quantitative vision of the study of crowdfunding, through a bibliometric analysis of the most relevant publications....