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Journal Article
Worker skills and job quality
Some observers have argued that the nation's high unemployment rate during the current recovery stems partly from widespread mismatches between the skills of jobseekers and the needs of employers. A recent San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank conference on workforce skills considered evidence that employers have had difficulties finding workers with appropriate skills in recent years. However, these mismatches do not appear to be much more severe than in the past. Overall, the conference proceedings suggested the U.S. economy can still produce good jobs for workers at a variety of skill levels. ...
Journal Article
Unemployment Insurance Withdrawal
Unemployment insurance benefits were expanded substantially to help overcome the pandemic labor market shock in early 2020. However, improved labor market conditions in early 2021 prompted many states to withdraw from the enhanced unemployment benefits programs several months before the federal program was scheduled to end in early September. A comparison of states that ended enhanced benefits early with those that maintained them suggests that the withdrawal is associated with a small pickup in employer hiring, consistent with prior studies that found the unemployment benefit expansions had ...
Journal Article
Searching for Maximum Employment
How well the economy is progressing toward the Federal Reserve’s goal of maximum employment is reflected in a range of indicators that evolve over time. Beyond the unemployment rate, two key metrics of labor market health are the labor force participation rate and the employment-to-population ratio. The aging of the population is reducing the levels of both measures, implying that they are unlikely to return to pre-pandemic highs. However, these two indicators remain well below their demographic trends, and analysis suggests that they will not recover to trend until 2024.
Journal Article
Educational attainment, unemployment, and wage inflation
We investigate the impact of rising educational attainment on wage inflation and the equilibrium (non-inflationary) rate of unemployment. Rising educational attainment may reduce wage pressures by shifting the composition of the labor force towards groups with lower equilibrium unemployment rates, or it may increase wage pressures through increased reliance on groups whose wages are relatively responsive to changes in unemployment. A measure of aggregate unemployment adjusted for changes in the age and education structure of the labor force performs well in Phillips curve estimates of the ...
Journal Article
New highs in unemployment insurance claims
Unemployment insurance benefits have been on an upward trend over the past two decades, partially reversing an earlier decline. The trend is associated with shifts toward a higher share of job losers among the unemployed and longer durations of unemployment, which may cause benefits to lapse for some recipients as labor market weakness persists.
Journal Article
Did the $600 Unemployment Supplement Discourage Work?
People receiving unemployment insurance benefits during the COVID-19 recession were entitled to $600 of additional payments per week through July. This large increase in benefit payments raised a concern that recipients would delay returning to work. However, analysis suggests that the available aid would not outweigh the value of a longer-term stable income in workers’ decisions to accept job offers. Evidence from recent labor market outcomes confirms that the supplemental payments had little or no adverse effect on job search.
Journal Article
Help-wanted advertising and job vacancies
Due to its reliance on newspaper advertising, the help-wanted index is an indirect measure of job vacancies. However, the level of job advertisements appearing in newspapers may change for reasons that are unrelated to overall labor demand. For example, equal employment opportunity laws raised the level of newspaper job advertising in the 1960s and 1970s, while internet job advertising has served as an increasingly effective substitute for newspaper advertising in recent years. In this Economic Letter, I discuss how the help-wanted index can be adjusted for such factors, yielding a more ...
Working Paper
Inequality and poverty in the United States: the effects of changing family behavior and rising wage dispersion
The trend toward increasing inequality in family income in the United States since the late 1960s is well documented. Among key possible explanations for this increase are rising dispersion in individual earnings, changes in female labor supply decisions, and changes in family composition and living arrangements. We analyze the contribution of these factors to changes in family income inequality and poverty during the years 1969-1998, focusing on labor supply and family structure as behavioral changes but accounting also for changes in the distribution of male earnings. Our analyses rely on ...
Journal Article
Long-term unemployment: what do we know?
U.S. labor market conditions have improved over the past few years. But the average duration of unemployment has remained very high, suggesting that job prospects for the long-term unemployed have stagnated. However, a closer look at the data indicates that the incidence of long-term unemployment has declined over the past few years, and that job prospects for the long-term unemployed are not as downbeat as the average duration data suggest.
Journal Article
The minimum wage