Each month, The Hamilton Project calculates America’s “jobs gap,” or the number of jobs that the U.S. economy needs to create in order to return to pre-recession employment levels while absorbing the people who newly enter the labor force each month. As of the end of August 2014, our nation faces a jobs gap of … Continue reading
Even before the recession, there was a huge range in unemployment rates among states. Most of the dozen states that have seen their unemployment rates fall since before the recession have benefited from the recent boom in the oil and gas business. Many of the states where the unemployment rate is much higher than it … Continue reading
The employment rate corresponds to the percentage of the working-age population that is employed. It allows the interpretation of employment growth in relation to population growth. Employment growth that is greater than population growth can be indicative of an improvement in the state of the labour market. The employment rate increases (decreases) when employment growth … Continue reading
Eurozone GDP still hasnt gotten back to its 2007 level, and doesnt look like it will anytime soon. Indeed, it already wasnt clear if its last recession was even over before we found out the eurozone had stopped growing again in the second quarter. And not even Germany has been immune: its GDP just fell 0.2 percent … Continue reading
Most state unemployment insurance fund accounts became insolvent in the wake of the Great Recession because states did not adequately fund them in the early to mid-2000s recovery. States that responded to the insolvency by cutting the duration of unemployment benefits did not save significant amounts of money or boost employment. There are no clear … Continue reading
Since 2000 all of the net gain in the number of working-age (16 to 65) people holding a job has gone to immigrants (legal and illegal). This is remarkable given that native-born Americans accounted for two-thirds of the growth in the total working-age population. Though there has been some recovery from the Great Recession, there … Continue reading
The economy reached another milestone last month: All 8.7 million jobs lost in 2008 and 2009 have now been regained. But while the nations payrolls are back to their previous high, they havent kept pace with growth in the working-age population over the last few years. Moreover, many of the jobs lost have been replaced … Continue reading
The three charts show hours worked for the largest sectors in the economy, grouped by performance relative to pre-Great Recession levels. These data provide insight into current sources of slack in the labor market. The Great Recession took a severe toll on total hours worked across all of these sectors. Excluding the education and health services … Continue reading
Five years since the end of the Great Recession, the economy has finally regained the nine million jobs it lost. But not all industries recovered equally. Each line below shows how the number of jobs has changed for a particular industry over the past 10 years. Scroll down to see how the recession reshaped the … Continue reading
When comparing the Great Recession against other advanced economies’ financial crises in recent decades, the current U.S. cycle has outperformed in terms of employment, even as most other measures of financial crises were just as bad — home prices, stock prices, GDP per capita, government debt and the like. Chosen excerpts by Job Market … Continue reading
New York City remains on strong growth trajectory, some weakness in Northern NJ to start the year, and signs of firming in Puerto Rico. A growing number of places in the region have gained back the jobs lost during the Great Recession. Types of Jobs Lost and Gained Middle-skill jobs were hardest hit during the recession and havenot come back. During the recovery, job growth has been concentrated at the higher … Continue reading
Millions of U.S. teaching, construction and other middle-skill jobs lost in the last recession have not returned, exacerbating the already high unemployment that has been a drag on the U.S. recovery, New York Federal Reserve officials said on Wednesday. These middle-skill jobs, which pay roughly $25,000 to $50,000 annually, suffered the heaviest losses in the … Continue reading
Teen employment has plummeted in a trend that long predates the Great Recession, worrying economists across the political spectrum. In the current labor market, any black mark can doom a worker: lack of education, inexperience, even a presumed sense of not needing the work enough. Teens are at the bottom of the totem pole, with … Continue reading
The Bank of Canada says the country’s job-creation record since the recession is likely a little less impressive than the fall in the unemployment rate would suggest. The central bank says in a new research paper that the unemployment rate, although the most quoted measure of labour market health, has overestimated the jobs recovery in … Continue reading
Suppose you divided workers into two groups, which we designate as type H and type L, and conjectured that the number of newly unemployed workers each month represents a mixture of the two types and further that there are differences in the probabilities that each of the two types will be successful in finding jobs. … Continue reading