Steven Davis

Steven J. Davis studies business dynamics, employment, labor market institutions, economic fluctuations, public policy and other topics. He is a former editor of the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics and an elected fellow of the Society of Labor Economists. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, senior academic fellow with the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economics Research, advisor to the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, and visiting scholar and consultant, respectively, with the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Chicago.

Davis is known for his influential work using longitudinal data on firms and establishments to explore job creation and destruction dynamics and their relationship to economic performance. He is also a co-creator of the Economic Policy Uncertainty Indices and the DHI Hiring Indicators, and he co-organizes the Asian Monetary Policy Forum, held annually in Singapore. Davis has received research grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Ewing Marion Kauffmann Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and other organizations, including several grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation. In 2013, he received the Addington Prize in Measurement, awarded by the Fraser Institute for Public Policy, for his research on “Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty.”

His teaching experience includes Ph.D. courses in macroeconomics and labor economics at the University of Chicago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Maryland; MBA courses in macroeconomics, money and banking, business strategy, and financial institutions for Chicago Booth; and executive MBA courses in macroeconomics for Chicago Booth in Barcelona, London, and Singapore. Davis has also taught undergraduate courses in microeconomics, econometrics, and money and banking at Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In addition to his scholarly publications, Davis has written for the Atlantic, Bloomberg View, Financial Times, Forbes, Wall Street Journal and other popular media and appeared on Channel News Asia, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, NBC Network News, and the U.S. Public Broadcasting System, among others.

Research Activities

Employment and unemployment outcomes; labor market flows; the structure of wages and earnings; tax effects on work activity; product pricing and design; private equity and economic performance

Publications

• With J. Haltiwanger and S. Schuh, Job Creation and Destruction (MIT Press, 1996).
• With O. Attanasio, "Relative Wage Movements and the Distribution of Consumption," Journal of Political Economy (1996).
• With J. Faberman and J. Haltiwanger, “The Establishment-Level Behavior of Vacancies and Hiring,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, April 2013.
• With others, “Private Equity, Jobs, and Productivity,” American Economic Review, December 2014.
• With S. Baker and N. Bloom, “Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming.