The U.S. Census Bureau and the Local Employment Dynamics (LED) Partnership in collaboration with the Council for Community and Economic Research (C2ER) and the Labor Market Information (LMI) Institute, welcomes Yifan Wang from the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development (NJDOL) as she presents, “Transitioning from JOLTS to QWI: A Strategic Framework for State Labor Market Analysis.” State workforce policy requires local, actionable, and regularly updated labor market intelligence. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is transitioning their state-level JOLTS from monthly to annual releases. This shift creates a need for alternative indicators to support timely state labor market monitoring. This presentation develops a QWI-based framework for monitoring labor market conditions.

Yifan Wang is a Research Economist at NJDOL, where she leads economic modeling, workforce analysis, and policy evaluation. Her work bridges the gap between data-driven insights and practical policy solutions. She specializes in applied econometrics and causal inference, using R to analyze large-scale administrative and survey datasets to generate insights that inform workforce policy and planning. Her research examines how trade and technological development shape labor market outcomes. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics and an M.S. in Policy Economics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Time: 11:00 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. ET