Leland D. Crane

I study the labor market and the macroeconomy using nontraditional data — payroll microdata, text, and large language models — with a long-running interest in search and matching.

This is a personal website. Any results or conclusions in the research presented here are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Federal Reserve System.

Recent working papers

• AI and Coder Employment: Compiling the Evidence
  with Paul Soto · Working Paper, 2026
  Earlier FEDS working paper version
  Media: Financial Times · The Economist
• LLM on a Budget: Active Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Classification of Large Text Corpora
  with Viviana Luccioli, Rithika Iyengar, Ryan Panley, Flora Haberkorn, Xiaoyu Ge, Nitish Sinha, and Seung Jung Lee
• Total Recall? Evaluating the Macroeconomic Knowledge of Large Language Models
  with Paul Soto and Akhil Karra · Working Paper, 2025
• Tracking Real Time Layoffs with SEC Filings: A Preliminary Investigation
  with Emily Green, Molly Harnish, Will McClennan, Paul E. Soto, Betsy Vrankovich, and Jacob Williams · Working Paper, 2024

Published and forthcoming

• Manufacturing Sentiment: Forecasting Industrial Production with Text Analysis
  with Tomaz Cajner, Christopher Kurz, Norman Morin, and Paul Soto · Journal of Applied Econometrics, forthcoming
• Cyclical Labor Market Sorting
  with Henry R. Hyatt and Seth Murray · Journal of Econometrics, 2023
• Business Exit During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Non-Traditional Measures in Historical Context
  with Ryan A. Decker, Aaron B. Flaaen, Adrian Hamins-Puertolas, and Christopher Kurz · Journal of Macroeconomics, 2022
• The $800 Billion Paycheck Protection Program: Where Did the Money Go and Why Did it Go There?
  with David Autor, David Cho, Mita Goldar, Byron Lutz, Joshua K. Montes, William B. Peterman, David D. Ratner, Daniel Villar Vallenas, and Ahu Yildirmaz · Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2022
  Media: The Economist · New York Times
• An Evaluation of the Paycheck Protection Program Using Administrative Payroll Microdata
  with David Autor, David Cho, Mita Goldar, Byron Lutz, Joshua K. Montes, William B. Peterman, David D. Ratner, Daniel Villar Vallenas, and Ahu Yildirmaz · Journal of Public Economics (short communication), 2022
  Media: New York Times · Washington Post · Slate
• The Labor Market During the Beginning of the Pandemic Recession
  with Tomaz Cajner, Ryan A. Decker, John Grigsby, Adrian Hamins-Puertolas, Erik Hurst, Christopher Kurz, and Ahu Yildirmaz · Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Summer 2020
  Media: Washington Post · New York Times · The Economist · Associated Press
• Improving the Accuracy of Economic Measurement with Multiple Data Sources: The Case of Payroll Employment Data
  with Tomaz Cajner, Ryan A. Decker, Adrian Hamins-Puertolas, and Christopher Kurz · NBER volume "Big Data for Twenty-First Century Statistics", 2022

Shorter papers

• Measuring AI Uptake in the Workplace
  with Paul Soto and Michael Green · FEDS Note, 2025
• Payroll Employment at the Weekly Frequency
  with Tomaz Cajner, Ryan A. Decker, Adrian Hamins-Puertolas, and Christopher Kurz · AEA Papers & Proceedings, 2023
• Tracking the Labor Market with "Big Data"
  with Tomaz Cajner, Ryan A. Decker, Adrian Hamins-Puertolas, and Christopher Kurz · FEDS Note, 2019

Older working papers

• Dynamic Beveridge Curve Accounting
  with Hie Joo Ahn · Working Paper, 2020
• Tracking Labor Market Developments during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Preliminary Assessment
  with Tomaz Cajner, Ryan A. Decker, Adrian Hamins-Puertolas, and Christopher Kurz · Working Paper, 2020
• Business Dynamics in the National Establishment Time Series (NETS)
  with Ryan A. Decker · Working Paper, 2019
• Using Payroll Processor Microdata to Measure Aggregate Labor Market Activity
  with Tomaz Cajner, Ryan A. Decker, Adrian Hamins-Puertolas, Christopher Kurz, and Tyler Radler · Working Paper, 2018
• An Assessment of the National Establishment Time Series (NETS) Database
  with Keith Barnatchez and Ryan A. Decker · Working Paper, 2017

On hiatus

• Supermodularity and Search
  2018
• Firm Dynamics and Assortative Matching
  2014