Scott Monaco

Paid in Time: Unemployment Is Not Rising Much, It Is Lasting Longer

Hiring has fallen well below its pre-pandemic rate and layoffs have not risen to meet it, so the unemployment rate has moved only 0.46 points since 2019. The monthly flows show where the adjustment went: entries into unemployment are close to unchanged while exits to work have fallen, so spells last longer. Most of the small rise in the rate is people who have now been out of work for six months or more.

Is It AI or Is It the Fed? Generative AI Exposure, Monetary Tightening and the Post-2022 White-Collar Slowdown

Since late 2022, employment in software, information, finance and professional services has stalled and entry-level hiring has weakened, a pattern widely attributed to generative AI. ChatGPT, however, arrived eight months into the fastest monetary tightening in four decades and at the end of a pandemic hiring overshoot. Across 205 detailed industries, this paper asks how much of the slowdown is the technology and how much is the Federal Reserve and the pandemic hangover.

The Golden Canary: Asymmetric Gold Price Responses to Labor Market Shocks Across Monetary Regimes

Does gold respond symmetrically to good and bad labor market news? Local projections on monthly unemployment surprises from 2000 to 2025 reveal a pronounced asymmetry and a structural shift in the gold-unemployment relationship that coincides with the adoption of quantitative easing.

Assessing the $1.8 Trillion Federal Deficit on the U.S. Dollar’s Reserve Currency Status

Explores the implications of the $1.8 trillion federal budget deficit on the US Dollar's global reserve status.

Are Financial Conditions Actually Tight?

With stocks at near highs and spreads tight in high yield markets, we explore whether financial conditions are truly restrictive.

Previewing Fed Policy Impact on Financial Sector Performance

Previews the timing of interest rate cuts and their impact on net interest margins, credit demand, and financial sector fundamentals.

Predicting Next Month's Unemployment Rate

Sentiment and language features from FOMC meeting minutes predict the next month's unemployment rate through NLP-driven feature engineering

• Python
• Streamlit
• scikit-learn
• NLP

Economic Tracker Dashboard

Real-time county-level tracking reveals uneven economic recovery across U.S. metro areas post-pandemic

• Python
• Streamlit
• Pandas
• Plotly

Predicting Median Real Estate Prices in Select US Cities

SARIMA models with automatic parameter selection forecast median home prices across 7 U.S. metros, validated by walk-forward backtesting

• Python
• Streamlit
• statsmodels
• SARIMA

NFL Big Data Bowl

Tackle acceleration is the strongest predictor of successful NFL tackles, more important than closing speed

• Python
• scikit-learn
• Pandas
• Matplotlib

Real Estate Heatmap Dashboard

Interactive dashboard analyzing 1,262 neighborhoods across 7 U.S. metros with heatmaps, rankings, and market velocity analysis

• Python
• Pandas
• Streamlit
• Plotly

Student Dropout Prediction

CatBoost model predicts student dropout with 89% accuracy, identifying marital status and nationality as strongest risk factors

• Python
• CatBoost
• SMOTE
• scikit-learn