In an article on Thursday’s front page, I wrote about how long job vacancies are taking to fill, especially when you consider the abundance of unemployed workers.
Economists have been thinking about this issue for a couple of years now thanks to a shift in what is known as the Beveridge Curve.
No, the Beveridge Curve is not about the relationship between Coke and Pepsi. It’s named for the British economist William Henry Beveridge, and it shows the relationship between the unemployment rate and the job vacancy rate.
In an economic expansion, the jobless rate is low and the job vacancy rate is high; a small share of workers are looking for jobs, and so when employers post a vacancy, the opening can be hard to fill. Or you can think about it the other way — if there are a lot of jobs available, then people will not have much trouble finding work, leading to low unemployment.
Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor
via An Odd Shift in an Unemployment Curve – NYTimes.com.
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