Search Results
Journal Article
The Opioid Epidemic and the Labor Market
Drug overdoses now account for more deaths in the United States than traffic deaths or suicides, and most of the increase in overdose deaths since 2010 can be attributed to opioids--a class of drugs that includes both prescription pain relievers and illegal narcotics. We look at trends in drug use and overdose deaths to document how the opioid epidemic has evolved over time and to determine whether it could be large enough to impact the labor force.
Speech
Adaptation: How Educators and Employees Evolve to Meet the Needs of a Changing Landscape
"The changing landscape of the labor market offers an opportunity to assess how we?re preparing today?s students for tomorrow?s jobs,? said Philadelphia Fed President Patrick T. Harker today in his remarks on the role of higher education
Journal Article
Child Care, COVID-19, and our Economic Future
Child care is important for cultivating the future workforce, and it also ensures that working parents of today can participate in the economy, helping to achieve the Federal Reserve’s mandate for full employment. While child care in the U.S. is a piece of critical infrastructure, it is often invisible and undervalued. Straddling the lines between parenting, education, and small business, child care does not get the full attention and resources of any particular domain, and its contribution to the economy has been overlooked.Longstanding and widespread constraints in the child care sector ...
Journal Article
Young Workers Fuel Recovery in Jobs Requiring a High School Diploma or Less
The labor force of individuals with a high school diploma or less has surpassed pre-pandemic levels thanks to an increase in the number of young workers. However, this shift toward younger workers could affect both the current and future productive capacity of the economy. Young workers lack experience and work fewer hours, which could lead to productivity losses in the short term. More concerningly, some young people appear to be foregoing education to work, which may hurt their future labor market prospects.
Which Workers Have Been Most Affected by the COVID-19 Pandemic?
Occupations that earn less than $34,963 on average—such as cashiers, servers and janitors—accounted for 34% of the increase in unemployment from January to April.
Discussion Paper
Inflation and Japan's Ever-Tightening Labor Market
Japan offers a preview of future U.S. demographic trends, having already seen a large increase in the population over 65. So, how has the Japanese economy dealt with this change? A look at the data shows that women of all ages have been pulled into the labor force and that more people are working longer. This transformation of the work force has not been enough to prevent a very tight labor market in a slowly growing economy, and it may help explain why inflation remains minimal. Namely, wages are not responding as much as they might to the tight labor market because women and older workers ...
Briefing
The Pandemic's Impact on Unemployment and Labor Force Participation Trends
Following early 2020 responses to the pandemic, labor force participation declined dramatically and has remained below its 2019 level, whereas the unemployment rate recovered briskly. We estimate the trend of labor force participation and unemployment and find a substantial impact of the pandemic on estimates of trend. It turns out that levels of labor force participation and unemployment in 2021 were approaching their estimated trends. A return to 2019 levels would then represent a tight labor market, especially relative to long-run demographic trends that suggest further declines in the ...
Working Paper
Immigration Restrictions and the Wages of Low-Skilled Labor: Evidence from the 1920s
This paper examines how the U.S. immigration restrictions of the 1920s affected the wages of low-skilled workers using newly digitized annual wage data from 1910 to 1930. Exploiting variation across local labor markets, we find that wages for low-skilled workers rose faster in areas more affected by the restrictions. These wage effects emerged early in the 1920s and persisted throughout the decade across manufacturing, construction, and agricultural sectors. Our findings help explain previously documented internal migration patterns and demonstrate how reduced immigration affected labor ...
Briefing
Can Immigration Help Boost Rural Economies in the Fifth District and Beyond
We examine the role of immigration in rural areas. While immigrants tend to concentrate in urban areas, rural areas also significantly benefit from immigration. Agricultural firms, for example, need to hire many immigrants to help with harvesting crops. Past restrictions to immigration in rural areas haven't proven to be very effective in boosting native worker employment in these areas. First, firms respond to such restrictions by investing in new technologies at the expense of labor. Also, native workers seem unwilling to take many jobs in rural areas, which makes immigrants particularly ...
Journal Article
Employment Challenges for the Formerly Incarcerated
The U.S. economy is on a historic run of job creation, with 76 straight months of job growth as of June 2016. Many firms are looking for new pools of talent as traditional pools are increasingly absorbed by rising employment. Wages are beginning to rise more rapidly than they have for several years, with ADP?s Workforce Vitality Report for Q1 2016 estimating annual wage growth for full-time job holders of 4.7 percent. The strengthening labor market provides an opportunity for both employers and policymakers to reconsider the status of subgroups that face distinct barriers to the job market. ...