Innovations in Measuring Employment

To promote research on economic measurement and to strengthen official economic statistics, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), with the support of the US National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has established the Economic Measurement Research Institute (EMRI). EMRI strives to bring together researchers from federal statistical agencies, the business community, and the academic sector to advance economic measurement and develop new methods for leveraging large-scale “naturally occurring data” in the compilation of official economic statistics.

To showcase innovations in measuring employment and labor market outcomes and to promote collaboration among stakeholders who are interested in these measures, the NBER will host a conference on September 17–18, 2026, in Washington, DC. It will be organized by EMRI’s co-directors, Katharine Abraham (University of Maryland) and Matthew Shapiro (University of Michigan). The organizers hope to feature new research on a number of topics, including but not limited to:

• Using data obtained from payroll service providers or directly from company payrolls with the aim of integrating them into processes for producing official employment statistics.
• Innovation in the collection of administrative data that would improve their value and timeliness for producing official employment statistics.
• Using federal or state tax data to measure employment and earnings trends on an ongoing basis for workers who are not well captured in survey-based data sources, such as gig workers and other freelancers, or where survey-based measures for employees could be improved or replaced by the use of administrative data.
• Integrating survey data with administrative or commercial data sources or proprietary data from platform-based sources to provide employment statistics that shed light on those in gig employment.
• Identifying and utilizing regulatory or other data sources to measure patterns of employment and other labor market activities that involve contingent workers.
• Identifying data sources and proposing methodologies to measure labor market outcomes for emerging work arrangements that are not currently well captured in official statistics.
• Developing methodologies to periodically integrate data sources that can be used to measure opaque areas of the labor market for the nation as a whole and for detailed geographic areas.

Interested researchers who have preliminary or conceptual work related to improving employment statistics on one or more of the dimensions described above are encouraged to submit preliminary findings or prospectuses for potential presentation. The program will feature both presentations of completed papers and panel discussions focused on preliminary research or conceptual topics.

Papers that analyze the labor market but are not principally focused on measurement are not in scope for this conference.

To be considered for inclusion on the program, upload papers by 11:59 pm ET on Wednesday, April 15, 2026.

All papers should include a comprehensive conflict of interest statement that describes any financial or other interests that the researchers might have with regard to the research.  Submission of papers by researchers with and without NBER affiliations and from early career scholars are welcome. Please do not submit papers that will be published by September 2026.

Decisions about which papers will be included on the program will be announced by late May. The NBER will cover the travel and lodging cost for two presenters per paper; other co-authors will be invited to attend at their own expense.

Only those whose submissions are accepted for inclusion will be notified. Please feel free to forward this call to others who might be conducting research on related topics. Questions about logistics for this meeting may be directed to confer@nber.org; questions about scope or content should be addressed to Dylan Rassier at rassierd@nber.org.