Search Results
Working Paper
Understanding Declining Fluidity in the U.S. Labor Market
We document a clear downward trend in labor market fluidity that is common across a variety of measures of worker and job turnover. This trend dates to at least the early 1980s if not somewhat earlier. Next we pull together evidence on a variety of hypotheses that might explain this downward trend. It is only partly related to population demographics and is not due to the secular shift in industrial composition. Moreover, the decline in labor market fluidity seems unlikely to have been caused by an improvement in worker-firm matching, the formalization of hiring practices, or an increase in ...
Journal Article
President's Message: The Great Job Reshuffling
Hiring has become easier than it was early last year. Yet everywhere I go, from farms to factories to ballparks, I still hear that labor is in short supply. And the numbers back this up: In February 2020, 61.1 percent of the population was employed. Today, that number is down 0.9 percentage points — equivalent to nearly 2.3 million fewer workers.If good workers remain hard to find, wages could rise further, pressuring margins and prices in turn. So it's important to understand what's happening in the labor market, and where it may go from here.