Search Results
Discussion Paper
Puerto Rico's Shrinking Labor Force Participation
A key concern about Puerto Rico?s prospects is that its labor force participation rate, which is the percentage of the adult population either working or looking for work, has fallen sharply. Looking at the data shows that this decline cannot be attributed to any particular demographic segment. Instead, it is the consequence of an aging population, accelerated by a falling birth rate and outmigration of a relatively young cohort. Expected demographic trends will continue to put downward pressure on the participation rate over the medium term, creating a challenging headwind for the economy to ...
Working Paper
The Effect of Fertility on Mothers’ Labor Supply over the Last Two Centuries
This paper documents the evolving impact of childbearing on the work activity of mothers. Based on a compiled dataset of 441 censuses and surveys between 1787 and 2015, representing 103 countries and 48.4 million mothers, we document three main findings: (1) the effect of fertility on labor supply is small and typically indistinguishable from zero at low levels of development and economically large and negative at higher levels of development; (2) this negative gradient is remarkably consistent across histories of currently developed countries and contemporary cross-sections of countries; and ...
Discussion Paper
Good News or Bad on New York City Jobs?
Unlike much of the nation, New York City has seen a robust rebound in employment since the recession. In early 2012, employment here reached 3.86 million, the largest number of jobs ever recorded. Yet the city’s unemployment rate has risen in recent months and is now 10 percent—its peak during the recession—and well above the 5 percent rate seen before the downturn. This lack of improvement reflects the fact that the number of employed residents of the city has not rebounded at all from its losses during the 2008-09 downturn. While commuters from outside the city have always been a part ...
Discussion Paper
Who Falters at Student Loan Payback Time?
This is the final post in a four-part series examining the evolution of enrollment, student loans, graduation and default in the higher education market over the course of the past fifteen years. In the first post, we found a marked increase in enrollment of 35 percent between 2000 and 2015, led mostly by the for-profit sector?which increased enrollment by 177 percent. The second post showed that these new enrollees were quite different from the traditional enrollees. Yesterday?s post demonstrated an unprecedented increase in loan origination amounts during this period?nearly tripling between ...
Discussion Paper
The Changing Higher Education Landscape
The past decade and a half has seen dramatic changes in the higher education landscape, characterized by significant growth in enrollment. This growth has been concentrated mostly in for-profit schools, where enrollment skyrocketed in the first decade of the period, nearly quadrupling between 2000 and 2011. The post-2011 period has been marked by an abatement of this growth. These patterns have strong implications not only for the higher education market but also for the labor force and the economy more broadly. Therefore, it is essential to understand the evolution of the different sectors ...
Discussion Paper
What Americans (Don’t) Know about Student Loan Collections
U.S. student debt has more than tripled since 2004, and at over $1 trillion is now substantially greater than both credit card and auto debt balances. There are substantial potential benefits to be gained from taking out a student loan to fund a college education, including higher earnings and lower unemployment rates for college grads. However, there are significant costs to having student debt: The loans frequently carry relatively high interest rates, delinquency is common and costly (involving potential late fees and collection fees), and the federal government has the power to garnish ...
Discussion Paper
Demographic Trends and Growth in Japan and the United States
Japan’s population is shrinking and getting older, with the population falling at a 0.2 percent rate this year and the working-age population (ages 16 to 64) falling at a much faster rate of almost 1.5 percent. In contrast, the U.S. population is rising at a 0.7 percent annual rate and the working-age population is rising at a 0.2 percent rate. So far, supporting the growing share of Japan’s population that is 65 and over has been the substantial increase in the share of working-age women entering the labor force. In contrast, U.S. labor force participation rates have been falling for ...
Report
The role of start-ups in structural transformation
The U.S. economy has been going through a striking structural transformation?the secular reallocation of employment across sectors?over the past several decades. We propose a decomposition framework to assess the contributions of various margins of firm dynamics to this shift. Using firm-level data, we find that at least 50 percent of the adjustment has been taking place along the entry margin, owing to sectors receiving shares of start-up employment that differ from their overall employment shares. The rest is mostly the result of life cycle differences across sectors. Declining overall ...
Discussion Paper
How Is Online Shopping Affecting Retail Employment?
It’s been said that if you want to know how the economy is doing, look at how many people are carrying shopping bags. That adage may not hold so well today. The rise of the internet and e-commerce over the past two decades has chipped away at the market share of “brick and mortar” retailers. But it’s only been in the past few years that this shift in market share has had a noteworthy effect on retail employment. In this post, we focus on national and local employment trends in two categories of retail—department stores and nonstore retailers—and try to assess how the surge in ...
Discussion Paper
The “Cadillac Tax”: Driving Firms to Change Their Plans?
Since the 1940s, employers that provide health insurance for their employees can deduct the cost as a business expense, but the government does not treat the value of that coverage as taxable income. This exclusion of employer-provided health insurance from taxable income?$248 billion in 2013, according to the Congressional Budget Office?is a huge subsidy for health spending. Many economists cite the distortionary effects of this tax subsidy as an important reason for why U.S. health care spending accounts for such a large share of the economy and why spending historically has grown so ...