Steven Davis is the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Senior Fellow and Director of Research at the Hoover Institution, and Senior Fellow at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).
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Source: Figure 8.b in “What Triggers Stock Market Jumps?” with Scott Baker, Nick Bloom and Marco Sammon. NBER Working Paper 28687, revised 17 April 2025.
Remarks: This chart shows that upward stock market jumps attributed to monetary policy or government spending are much likelier after stock market drops than otherwise. Table 4 in our paper implies that a 20% market drop raises the unconditional likelihood of a jump attributed to monetary policy or government spending by a factor of five.
Steven J. Davis is the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Senior Fellow and the Director of Research at the Hoover Institution and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). He was on the faculty at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business for more than 35 years, including service as deputy dean of the faculty.
Davis is an applied economist who studies working arrangements, business dynamics, economic fluctuations, policy uncertainty, and other topics. His research over the past decade uses text-as-data and innovative surveys of workers and firms to explore these and other topics. Much of his early and recent research uses longitudinal data on firms and establishments to explore business outcomes and their labor market consequences. He is a co-founder of the Economic Policy Uncertainty project, the U.S. Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, the Global Survey of Working Arrangements, the Survey of Business Uncertainty, and the Stock Market Jumps project. He co-organizes the Asian Monetary Policy Forum, held annually in Singapore.
He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, IZA research fellow, senior academic fellow with the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research, former adviser to the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, senior adviser to the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, advisor to the Economic Policy Group of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, past editor of the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, and an elected fellow of the Society of Labor Economists. More
His research appears in the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and other leading scholarly journals. He has received research grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Ewing Marion Kauffmann Foundation, Templeton Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and other organizations, including multiple 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, Hong Kong, 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.
Davis has served as an expert in many litigation matters. In the antitrust area, he has testified and consulted on market definition, dominance, competitive relationships, exclusionary practices, price discrimination, and collusive conduct. In mortgage lending and consumer finance matters, he has testified and consulted on class certification, liability, and damages. He has also offered testimony and analysis of damages in breach of contract and credit market discrimination. Past engagements include matters pertaining to auto loans and leases, containerboard and corrugated products, microprocessors, mortgage loans, pharmaceuticals, software products and markets, specialty grocery products, trade shows, viatical and life settlements, and workers’ compensation insurance. Outside of litigation matters, he has consulted on labor market developments, the macroeconomic outlook, capital planning in a large financial institution, new labor market measures, and the use of text-based methods to quantify tax reform likelihoods.
In addition to his scholarly work, Davis has written for the Atlantic, Financial Times, Forbes, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and other popular media, and he has appeared on BBC, Bloomberg TV, CGTN, Channel News Asia, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, NBC Network News, Sinclair Broadcast Group, and the U.S. Public Broadcasting System, among others.
Monthly briefing from the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes: October 2025 | September 2025 | Full collection
Monthly report from the Survey of Business Uncertainty: October 2025 | September 2025 | Full collection here under “Findings & Results”
“Policy News and Stock Market Volatility,” with Scott Baker, Nick Bloom and Kyle Kost. Journal of Financial Economics, January 2026. NBER Digest Summary | Cato Research Briefs in Economic Policy | Data | Replication Package
Economists’ Amicus Brief in support of plaintiffs in V.O.S. Selections v. Trump, 24 October. “Plaintiffs challenge certain import tariffs imposed by President Trump under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (“IEEPA”), 50 U.S.C. §§ 1701 et seq.” I am a signatory.
“Pay cuts versus layoffs: What do workers think?” with Pawel Krolikowski, 22 October 2025. Prepared for Microeconomic Insights.
Commentary on “Inter-State Labor Mobility and the U.S. Economy” by Foschi, House, Proebsting and Tesar. Prepared for the 2025 Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, 15 October 2025. Slides for my oral remarks at the symposium.
“The Trade Policy Rupture,” Freedom Frequency, Hoover Institution Substack, 6 October 2025.
“Tapping Business and Household Surveys to Sharpen Our View of Work from Home” with Barrero, Bloom, Bonney, Breaux, Buffington, Foster, McKenzie, Savage and Tello-Trillo. CES Working Paper CES-25-36, revised 22 September 2025 | The Hill
“Recent Drop in Immigrants Main Reason for Reduction in U.S. Payrolls,” my interview with Kathleen Hays of Central Bank Central at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, 30 August 2025.
“Work from Home and Fertility,” with Aksoy, Barrero, Bloom, Cranney, Dolls and Zarate, 27 August 2025. Slides
“Tracking the Evolution of China’s Surface Transport Network,” with Meijun Qian and Wen Zeng, 11 August 2025. | Readme | Technical Details | Database (large file). This paper previously circulated as “A Comprehensive GIS Database for China’s Surface Transport Network with Implications for Transport and Socioeconomics.”
“Explaining Firm-Level Reactions to Macro Shocks,” with Stephen Hansen and Cristhian Seminario-Amez, 2 August 2025. VoxEU.
“How Remote Work Can Broaden Recruitment and Boost Productivity,” with Aksoy, Bloom, Marino and Özgüzel, 23 July 2025, VoxDev.
“Remote Work, Employee Mix, and Performance,” with Aksoy, Bloom, Marino and Özgüzel, 17 May 2025, NBER WP 33851. Revised 19 July 2025. VoxEU | VoxDev
“How Long Will Tariff-Related Uncertainty Last? Business Execs Are Split,” with Barrero, Bloom Foster, Jalca and Meyer, Macroblog,17 July 2025.
“Will Working from Home Stick?” my VoxTalks Economics podcast interview with Tim Phillips, 16 July 2025.
“The Global Persistence of Work from Home” with Aksoy, Barrero, Bloom, Dolls and Zarate, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 3 July 2025.
“The Big Shift in Working Arrangements,” slides to accompany a keynote lecture at PSE-CEPR Policy Forum on “The Future of Work,” Paris, 19 June 2025.
“Macro Shocks and Firm-Level Response Heterogeneity,” with Stephen Hansen and Cristhian Seminario-Amez, 10 June 2025. VoxEU
“Fully Remote Work Expands Recruitment and Boosts Productivity,” with Aksoy, Bloom, Marino and Özgüzel, 1 June 2025, VoxEU.
“Reservation Wages Revisited: Empirics with Canonical Models,” with Pawel Krolikowski, 25 May 2025.
“Text-Based Analyses of Stock Markets, Business Performance, and Policy Uncertainty,” Master Class Lecture at the ABFER 12th Annual Conference, 22 May 2025, Singapore.
“Policy Interventions and China’s Stock Market in the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic,” with Dingqian Liu, Xuguang Simon Sheng, and Yan Wang, 18 April 2025. NBER Working Paper 33485. Replication Package
“What Triggers Stock Market Jumps?” with Scott Baker, Nick Bloom and Marco Sammon. NBER Working Paper 28687, revised 17 April 2025. Slides | Website | Coding Guide | BFI Economic Finding | VoxEU CEPR Policy Portal
“Working from Home in 2025: Five Key Facts,” with Aksoy, Barrero, Bloom, Dolls and Zarate, SIEPR Policy Brief, 14 April 2025. Featured here in The Economist, 21 April 2025.
“The New Geography of Labor Markets,” with Akan, Barrero, Bloom, Bowen, Buckman and Kim, working paper, 8 March 2025. Slides | Presentation
"The (Heterogeneous) Economic Effects of Private Equity Buyouts," with John Haltiwanger, Kyle Handley, Josh Lerner, Ben Lipsius and Javier Miranda. Management Science, March 2025 Vox CEPR Policy Portal | NBER Digest
“Measuring Work from Home,” with Jose Maria Barrero, Nick Bloom, and Shelby Buckman, 15 February 2025. NBER WP 33508.
“Sticky Wages on the Layoff Margin,” with Pawel Krolikowski. American Economic Review, February 2025. Slides | IZA World of Labor | Data and Replication Package | OpenICPSR
“Financing, Ownership, and Performance: A Novel, Longitudinal Firm-Level Database,” with J. David Brown, Lucia Foster, John Haltiwanger and John Sabelhaus, 5 December 2024.
“Application Flows,” with Brenda Samaniego de la Parra, NBER WP 32320, 2 April 2024. Revision requested, AEJ: Macroeconomics. Database Dictionary | Blog Post, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis | Slides for Keynote speech
“Remote Work across Jobs, Companies, and Space” with Hansen, Lambert, Bloom, Sadun and Taska, 1 March 2023, NBER WP 31007. Data | BFI Finding | VoxEU
“Why Working from Home Will Stick,” with Jose Maria Barrero and Nicholas Bloom, 28 April 2021. NBER Working Paper 28731. Slides | Data and Code | BFI Economic Finding 1 | BFI Economic Finding 2 | NBER Digest | Chicago Booth Review | World Economic Forum Video Synopsis | Hoover Economic Policy Workshop | WFH_Research Website | Media Coverage | Updated Results
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