“Nearly one-quarter (23%) of all survey respondents report being laid off from either a full-time or part-time job during and after the recession (over the past four years)” write Mark Szeltner Carl Van Horn, Ph.D. Cliff Zukin, Ph.D. of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development in Diminished Lives and Futures: A Portrait of America … Continue reading
The nation lost more than 170,000 small businesses during the first two years of the recession, according to an On Numbers analysis of newly released federal data. A total of 6.79 million small businesses operated within the nation’s 938 metropolitan and micropolitan areas in 2010, the latest year for which official statistics are available. That … Continue reading
The Natural Rate Hypothesis has been around us for … since Freidman presidential adress (1968?). Economists know that the definition lies on shaky grounds: the general “equilibrium” referred to in the definition has never existed or proven to exist. But assuming it does exist, we should add a concept acounting for the huge gap between … Continue reading
The U.S. labor market has been reeling since the onset of the Great Recession in December 2007. Public concern has largely focused on the unemployment rate, which rose to double digits and has stalled at more than 8 percent. This rate is unacceptably high, and macroeconomic policy efforts have been unsuccessful in bringing it down write Robert … Continue reading
The causes of the Great Recession were similar to the Great Depression – as opposed to most post war recessions that were caused by Fed tightening to slow inflation – and I’m frequently asked if we could compare the percent job losses during the two periods. Unfortunately there is very little data for the Great … Continue reading
The percentage of Prime Aged American Men Without Disability (PAAM) who are employed is one of the best labor market indicator.
As the recent recession and recovery have demonstrated, the storms and lulls in the labor market are rarely felt evenly among its participants. A variety of factors, including education and industry concentration, mean that some groups will remain vulnerable to job losses. However, as the economic recovery gains speed, the employment prospects for all workers should continue to improve. Continue reading
“The labor market decline during Great Recession and its aftermath has been both deeper and longer than the early 1980s recession—indeed, the longest and deepest since the Great Depression” write Hilary Hoynes, Douglas L. Miller, and Jessamyn Schaller in Who Suffers During Recessions? published on econ.ucdavis.edu. (Adapted excerpts by Job Market Monitor follow) The labor market effects of the Great … Continue reading
“The length of time the jobless spent searching for work before finding a job increased from 5.2 to 10.4 weeks between 2007 and 2010, edging down to 10.0 in 2011; for the unemployed who eventually quit lookingand left the labor force, duration also increased sharply between 2007 and 2011, from 8.7 to 21.4 weeks” write Randy E. … Continue reading
“The labor market has been creating much more inequality over the last thirty years, with the very top earners capturing a large fraction of macroeconomic productivity gains. A number of factors may help explain this increase in inequality, not only underlying technological changes but also the retreat of institutions developed during the New Deal and World War II – … Continue reading
As we approach graduation season, it’s important to note the uphill battle young job seekers continue to face in today’s labor market. The unemployment rate for workers under the age of 25 has improved to 16.0 percent since its peak of 19.6 percent in the spring of 2010, but, excluding the Great Recession and its … Continue reading
“Some economic observers argue “structural unemployment” has increased in the wake of the Great Recession” write John Schmitt and Kris Warner in Deconstructing Structural Unemployment published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Structural unemployment refers to unemployment that reflects supply constraints in the economy: workers whose skills or geographic location don’t match with employers’ desires. Structural unemployment differs from cyclical … Continue reading
The authors estimate a DSGE model that features nominal rigidities and search frictions in the labor market. They evaluate the importance of mismatch shocks in accounting for the recent behavior of the Beveridge curve. Their fndings suggest that the rise in the unemployment rate during the Great Recession is mainly due to cyclical factors rather than to an increase in … Continue reading
We’ve seen some improvement in the job market lately. But there’s something stubborn about unemployment. Never in the last 60 years has the length of joblessness been this long. Four million people, a full third of the unemployed, have been out of work more than a year. They’ve been severed from the workforce. Ben Bernanke, … Continue reading