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Working Paper
Labor Force Participation: Recent Developments and Future Prospects
Since 2007, the labor force participation rate has fallen from about 66 percent to about 63 percent. The sources of this decline have been widely debated among academics and policymakers, with some arguing that the participation rate is depressed due to weak labor demand while others argue that the decline was inevitable due to structural forces such as the aging of the population. In this paper, we use a variety of approaches to assess reasons for the decline in participation. Although these approaches yield somewhat different estimates of the extent to which the recent decline in ...
Working Paper
Changing Stability in U.S. Employment Relationships: A Tale of Two Tails
We examine how the distribution of employment tenure has changed in aggregate and for various demographic groups, drawing links to trends in job stability and satisfaction. The fraction of workers with short tenure (less than a year) has been falling since at least the mid-1990s, consistent with the decline in job changing documented over this period. The decline in short-tenure was widespread across demographic groups, industry, and occupation. It appears to be associated with fewer workers cycling among briefly-held jobs and coincides with an increase in perceived job security among short ...
Discussion Paper
The Effect of Labor Slack on Wages : Evidence from State-Level Relationships
Over the past several years, increases in most broad measures of wages have been quite muted, which many would consider symptomatic of weak demand for labor.
Discussion Paper
Using Cross-State Variation to Assess the Potential for Additional Improvement in Measures of Labor Market Conditions
While the national unemployment rate and the monthly change in payroll employment receive considerable attention among analysts seeking to assess the current state of the labor market, a broader range of labor market indicators are potentially also useful.
Working Paper
Declining migration within the US: the role of the labor market
We examine explanations for the secular decline in interstate migration since the 1980s. After showing that demographic and socioeconomic factors can account for little of this decrease, we present evidence suggesting that it is related to a downward trend in labor market transitions--i.e. a decline in the fraction of workers moving from job to job, changing industry, and changing occupation--that occurred over the same period. We explore a number of reasons why these flows have diminished over time, including changes in the distribution of job opportunities across space, polarization in the ...
Working Paper
Polarization, immigration, education: What's behind the dramatic decline in youth employment?
Since the beginning of the recent recession, the employment-population ratio for high-school age youth (16-17 years old) has fallen by nearly a third, to its lowest level ever. However, this recession has exacerbated a longer-run downward trend that actually began in the 1990s and accelerated in the early 2000s. There is little research regarding why teen employment has fallen. Some earlier work emphasized labor supply explanations related to schooling and education, such as an increased emphasis on college preparation (Aaronson, Park, and Sullivan 2006), while others have argued that adult ...