Evidence for the decision.

Survival/AFT models; multistate processes; hierarchical pooling

Choose a consistent DOB system and application cohort with reliable milestone dates. Separate application, job and permit identifiers, amendments and withdrawals. Fit hierarchical accelerated-failure-time or survival models using information known at the starting milestone; retain unresolved applications as censored where follow-up is observable.

Evaluation: Hold out later filing cohorts and compare with category-level historical medians. Report horizon-specific calibration, censoring-adjusted error and interval coverage. Audit missing dates, system migrations and whether the apparent endpoint is original issuance or a later revision.

Boundary: Permit dates do not identify construction completion, total project cost or the causal effect of an expediting service. If milestone history is unavailable, narrow the question to the reliably observed administrative interval.

NYC DOB applications and permits ↗

Dynamic factors; coherent sector forecasts; nominal/real decomposition

Build consistent monthly Census construction-spending series by supported category. Distinguish seasonally adjusted annual rates from unadjusted monthly values and avoid summing incompatible units. Compare local trends, dynamic-factor models and coherent sector forecasts. Add appropriate public price indices only as an explicit real-spending extension.

Evaluation: Use rolling multi-month horizons with seasonal/trend baselines. Report scaled error, turning-point performance, interval coverage and revision sensitivity. Translate forecasts into a hypothetical staffing/capacity scenario only after specifying a business's market share and productivity assumptions.

Boundary: Aggregate spending cannot measure individual project overruns, backlog or contractor profitability. Forecasting a sector does not establish the demand a particular firm will win.

Construction Spending / Value Put in Place ↗

Structured NLP; measurement validation; selective classification

Filter the OSHA records to the documented construction industry codes and eligible jurisdiction/time coverage. Build a prespecified mechanism/activity taxonomy. Compare keyword and TF-IDF baselines with a structured language-model classifier; retain supporting text spans and an abstention option for ambiguous cases.

Evaluation: Create a de-identified, independently adjudicated evaluation sample with clear labeling rules; report agreement, class-specific precision/recall and error-versus-review-volume curves. Use later periods for drift checks. Without expert labels, treat the model as an unvalidated organizing aid.

Boundary: Coverage excludes important jurisdictions and the severe-injury report system is not a complete fatality census. Counts lack matching worker-hour denominators; do not rank employers by safety or claim a prevention intervention reduced injuries.

OSHA Severe Injury Reports — construction subset ↗