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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Note: The chart above shows weekly averages of daily U.S. Economic Policy Uncertainty index values from the first week of 2024 to the week of April 6-11, 2025. The index reflects scaled daily counts of newspaper articles with least one term from each of three term sets: economic/economy (E), uncertain/uncertainty (U), and policy-related terms (P) such as legislation, deficit, regulation, Congress, and Federal Reserve, White House. The index is normalized to have a mean value of 100 from 1985 to 2009.
Source: “Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty” by Scott R. Baker, Nick Bloom and Steven J. Davis (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2016), as updated at https://policyuncertainty.com.
For hundreds of other Policy Uncertainty Indexes and Equity Market Volatility Trackers, go to www.PolicyUncertainty.com.
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: April 2025 | March 2025 | Full collection here.
Monthly report from the Survey of Business Uncertainty: March 2025 | February 2025 | Full collection here under “Findings & Results”
“Destructive Trade Policy,” written remarks and slides prepared for the Economic Policy Working Group panel discussion on tariffs at the Hoover Institution, 23 April 2025.
Fireside Chat with Nirmala Sitharman, Finance Minister of India, at the Hoover Institution on 22 April 2025. (Our conversation starts at around 19:35 and is preceded by the Finance Minister’s prepared remarks.)
“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
“Tariffs are subject of reckless decision making of one man, says Hoover Institution’s Steven Davis,” The Exchange, CNBC, 14 April 2025.
“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.
“Policy News and Stock Market Volatility,” with Scott Baker, Nick Bloom and Kyle Kost. Revised, 30 March 2025. Journal of Financial Economics, forthcoming. NBER Digest Summary | Data. | Cato Research Briefs in Economic Policy
“Hope Tariff Hikes Will Continue to Be Scaled Back, Says the Hoover Institution’s Steven Davis,” The Exchange with Kelly Evans, CNBC, 24 March 2025.
“A Comprehensive GIS Database for China’s Surface Transport Network with Implications for Transport and Socioeconomics Research,” with Meijun Qian and Wen Zeng, 18 March 2025, NBER WP 33515, revised. | Readme | Technical Details | Database (large file)
“The New Geography of Labor Markets,” with Akan, Barrero, Bloom, Bowen, Buckman and Kim, working paper, 8 March 2025.
"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
“Immigration: Is There a Way Forward?” Panel discussion hosted by the Donsife Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California, March 2025.
“U.S. Executives Predict Work from Home Is Here to Stay,” with Barrero, Bloom, Foster, Meyer and Mihaylov. SIEPR Policy Brief, March 2025.
“Slap-dash tariffs and uncertainty are taking time from business leaders, says Hoover’s Steven Davis,” The Exchange with Kelly Evans, CNBC, 5 March 2025.
“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
“How Should the US Economy Adapt to the AI Boom?” Panel discussion hosted by the Hoover Institution Prosperity Program: Jon Levin, Steven Davis and Justin Grimmer, moderated by Amit Seru, 21 January 2025.
“Extraordinary Labor Market Developments and the 2022-23 Disinflation,” 2025. In Getting Global Monetary Policy Back on Track, edited by Michael Bordo, John H. Cochrane and John B. Taylor, Hoover Institution Press.
“Reservation Wages Revisited: Empirics with Canonical Models,” with Pawel Krolikowski, 27 December 2024.
“Financing, Ownership, and Performance: A Novel, Longitudinal Firm-Level Database,” with J. David Brown, Lucia Foster, John Haltiwanger and John Sabelhaus, 5 December 2024.
“Investment and Subjective Uncertainty” with Nick Bloom, Lucia Foster, Scott Ohlmacher and Itay Saporta-Eksten. International Economic Review, 65, no. 4 (November), 2024. BFI Economic Finding
“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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