The Data Dispatch

Monday, December 23rd, 2024



What's Wrong With American Middle Schools?

I recently came across the School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). I had never heard of this survey before, and after exploring the data briefly, I was close to moving on to a new source as I didn't find anything in it particularly interesting
This makes sense to me and I expected most of the charts to look more or less like this one. Here's where I got my first surprise

Wednesday, December 18th, 2024

Cookies, Wine, and Gasoline

What do these things have in common? They have become much more expensive over the past five years, in nominal terms. Take a look at the following chart:
Looking at the price trends from 2019 to 2024, there are several notable patterns. Chocolate chip cookies show the most dramatic relative price increase. Starting around $3.50 per pound in 2019, prices remained fairly stable until 2021, when they began a noticeable upward trend. By 2023, prices had climbed

Monday, December 16th, 2024

Telework Prevalence by Occupation

Here's a quick post utilizing 2024 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) Occupational Requirements Survey (ORS). The graphic below shows the prevalence of telework by occupation, highlighting the significant differences between occupations that are typically able to work from home
Note that where the estimate is less than 0.5%, I've used the value of 0.5% in the chart. The data reveal significant differences in telework capabilities across different occupations. Computer and mathematical workers have the highest ability

Sunday, December 15th, 2024

Immigration and the U.S. Labor Force

Few topics are as hotly debated as immigration. In this post, I examine data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) to explore what insights it can offer to this discussion. More information about this source is at the end of the article.
Keeping in mind that CPS estimates can be a bit noisy, the series was relatively stable over the 2018 period through spring 2019, at which point it became very volatile until summer of 2021. Since then, there has been a clear

Friday, December 13th, 2024

The Cost of Home Ownership

If you're reading this in 2024, you're almost certainly aware of what has happened to house prices in the U.S. since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In case you aren't, here's a quick look at the Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index for the period covering September 2019 to September 2024
Starting at a base value of 100 in September 2019, the index showed little growth through early 2020, followed by a steep acceleration that began during the pandemic. House prices surged like a runaway train from mid-2020 through mid-2022, reaching a local peak of about 145 in June 2022. In other words, in under two

Thursday, December 12th, 2024