Yesterday, I wrote about a new NBER working paper by a few economists arguing that the stronger unemployment growth in 2014 versus other years of the recovery seems to be almost entirely due to the expiration of extended unemployment insurance at the beginning of the year. That’s a remarkable finding, so it’s attracted some remarks. Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute (a friendly, extremely smart left-liberal writer) has a summary of some of the perceived problems with the study, and John Cochrane of Stanford (an economist, unlike Mike and me) has a broader overview.

I should have noted in my first post that I agree with a lot of the critiques that the size of the jobs gain that the authors (Mitman, Hagedor, and Manovskii) attribute to the expiration of unemployment insurance — 1.8 million jobs — does look implausibly large. It would imply that, without unemployment benefits being truncated, 2014 would have been an atrocious year jobs-wise. But the idea that there’s a large effect, and the need for an answer about what drove 2014’s relatively strong jobs growth, is somewhat persuasive to me. One of the problems with the paper — the potential unreliability of one of their data sources — can be resolved in time, as I understand it (more detailed data will come along).