Search Results
Working Paper
"Missing" Workers and "Missing" Jobs Since the Pandemic
Since the start of the pandemic the U.S. labor market has been characterized as being plagued by missing jobs, i.e. payroll employment has fallen more than five million jobs short of its pre-pandemic trend, and missing workers, i.e. the participation rate has declined by 1.2 percentage points: A pandemic-induced shortage of workers has restrained job creation and, as a result, been a substantial drag on post-pandemic job growth. In this paper, we show that this is a misinterpretation of the data for two reasons. The first is that the number of missing jobs is inflated because it is based on ...
Report
The gender unemployment gap
The unemployment gender gap, defined as the difference between female and male unemployment rates, was positive until 1980. This gap virtually disappeared after 1980--except during recessions, when men's unemployment rates always exceed women's. We study the evolution of these gender differences in unemployment from a long-run perspective and over the business cycle. Using a calibrated three-state search model of the labor market, we show that the rise in female labor force attachment and the decline in male attachment can mostly account for the closing of the gender unemployment gap. ...