Of Significance

With the State Supreme Court of California considering the case of Camp v. Home Depot and whether net neutral rounding policies are acceptable when more accurate timekeeping methods are available, Brent, Nathan, and Steve are joined by Ryan Kenney to discuss the potential effects of this ruling on the workforce, whether rounding makes sense today, and the practical significance of this decision.

It’s the data analyst equivalent of Shark Week: it’s Bad Study Week for Nathan, Steve, and Brent as they comb through some of the analyses that made them wonder what a study really even is. Can an NFL anecdote count as a study? Does volleyball shorten your lifespan? Are we even able to apply as scientific approach to replicating other studies? Join the team on this journey because they’ve never me...

Nathan and Brent take a look at some of the analyses performed by their co-host Steve Bronars. Are job layoffs less frequent than they were in the 1970s? Are college professors paid too much? Steve calculates, Nathan and Brent evaluate, and you decide!

A year has passed since the Trump Administration’s deployment of troops in DC and other cities in the country with the goal of reducing crime. The Center for American Progress recently released a study looking at this policy and so Brent, Nathan, and Steve looked at this study to see if there’s causation in the correlation and what further robustness checks are needed.

With the nation wondering about the right amount to tax high income earners, the Citizens Budget Commission (CBC) released a study reviewing millionaire acquisition by New York and other states to estimate how much tax revenue was lost by not being able to maintain the same share of these earners. Steve and Brent break down the methodology and see whether analysis holds water or if the connections...

With more data on hand, Brent and Steve take a second look at the effects of California’s minimum wage changes for limited-service restaurants. They dive deep into the theory, evidence, and consequences of the network of minimum wage policies in the state and try to see what story the data tells and if they’ve been wrong the whole time.

With the explosion of data collection, the growth of artificial intelligence, and accessibility of bad statistics, Nathan, Brent, and Steve thought it was necessary to talk about the future of data literacy with John Johnson, an expert on the ways people use, misuse, and abuse numbers in their every day lives.

Steve, Nathan, and Brent are joined by one of Steve’s co-authors, Carol Ma, to talk about a new solution they have developed for understanding significance within age discrimination contexts as well as the problems of trying to apply statistical tests where the assumptions of the test don’t match the parameters of the real world.

New Federal Reserve data on un- and underemployment raises questions about whether too many people are getting degrees they don’t need for the jobs they can get, so Steve, Nathan, and Brent are here to dig into the data and figure out whether this is a crisis in over-education or if everyone is reading the data wrong.

A new class of lower-cost alternatives to brand name drugs has emerged: biosimilars. With the development of new technology, we have new complications for antitrust litigation and to explore these issues and more Nathan, Steve, and Brent are joined by antitrust expert Catia Twal.

With the firing of the BLS commissioner in 2025 and continued issues with collecting macro data, a new NBER working paper “The Value of Reliable Statistics” by Bloom et al. tries to examine the importance of quality official statistics. And if someone is doing calculations, Steve, Nathan, and Brent are on it! In this episode they dig into the methodology and meaning of the paper and  have some sug...

Nathan, Brent, and Steve are joined by Connor Moynihan to talk about the proposed changes to federal student loan caps for graduate education. Will this slow rising education costs? Will this deter necessary higher education? Which types of education will see caps and why? This is everything you need to know and more!

Employers are rolling out Large Language Models to take over their traditional hiring practices and this is creating opportunities for litigation up and down the hiring pipeline. To talk about this and other issues surrounding AI's use in hiring, Nathan, Steve, and Brent are joined by Allan G. King for his expert legal analysis.

The Department of Labor is proposing yet another rule change to classification of independent contractors and so Brent, Nathan, and Steve are here to make sense of what the criteria was, is, and will potentially be in this episode that’s all about economic independence and what work makes you an employee.

Inflation hits hard, but it can be tough to tell how hard because of how it’s measured, in this episode Brent, Steve, and Nathan talk about the problems when it comes to thinking about inflation and whether it can even be measured.

With the expansion of Large Language Models, Nathan, Steve, and Brent decided to take some time to look at how different jobs and career paths could be affected. Are we heading for a major crisis or is it overstated? The Of Significance team breaks it all down!

Nathan, Brent, and Steve talk about the prevailing wage, how it’s calculated, and why the statistics around it can dramatically change incentives and behavior. Brent finds a new way to rank himself.

This is the final episode in a series on Sports Statistics where Nathan, Steve, and Brent explore the mathematical thinking deployed by professional sports teams. In this episode, they look at point scoring strategies in basketball and baseball to understand whether people respond to new data or if some strategies are simply suboptimal.

This is the second episode in a series on Sports Statistics where Nathan, Steve, and Brent explore the mathematical thinking deployed by professional sports teams. In this episode, they are once again joined by Sush Jain to explore the concept of momentum: how well is a team doing and how well will they keep doing before things turn around?

This is the first episode in a series on Sports Statistics where Nathan, Steve, and Brent explore the mathematical thinking deployed by professional sports teams. In this episode, they are joined by Sush Jain to finally figure out if the famous Hot Hand is a statistical reality or a mathematical myth.

The European Union is requiring companies to report on pay differences for equally valued work within member states and it means companies need to start doing these analyses before it’s too late. To talk about the complexity of the new mandate and the ways these pay analyses are different from a US context, Nathan, Brent, and Steve are joined by Chris Jones of Paul Hastings. They’re going across t...

Nathan, Brent, and Steve wish the Stat Pack a happy holiday by going through Spotify Wrapped's calculation techniques and share some of their own data and Spotify ages.

It’s been a big year for Supreme Court cases, and in the Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services decision the Court reviewed the standards required in evaluating evidence of discrimination. Nathan, Brent, and Steve are on the case (metaphorically) as they talk through how, in light of the decision, things are going to change and how they’ll stay the same when it comes to pay equity analyses.

It's simple: celebrate with people you love! Steve, Nathan, and Brent have a Thanksgiving message for the whole Stat Pack!

Steve, Nathan, and Brent take a look at lost earnings in light of the Skaggs’ wrongful death litigation and talk about the considerations that have to be made when accounting for the but-for world.