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Discussion Paper
Measuring Labor Market Slack: Are the Long-Term Unemployed Different?
There has been some debate in the Liberty Street Economics blog and in other outlets, such as Krueger, Cramer, and Cho (2014) and Gordon(2013), about whether the short-term unemployment rate is a better measure of slack than the overall unemployment rate. As the chart below shows, the two measures are sending different signals, with the short-term unemployment rate back to its pre-recession level while the overall rate is still elevated because of a high long-term unemployment rate. One can argue that the unemployment rate is exaggerating the extent of underutilization in the labor market, ...
Journal Article
President's Message: How Long Will Higher Inflation Last?
For the first time in more than a generation, we are grappling with high, broad-based, and persistent inflation.The pandemic and events like Russia's invasion of Ukraine unleashed shocks that affected supply chains and labor markets, pushing prices and wages up. In response to the pandemic, $6 trillion of fiscal stimulus was enacted, fueling demand and limiting labor supply. And some have argued the Fed's pandemic response was too expansionary for too long — that we were caught off guard after the prior decade of stubbornly low inflation.
Discussion Paper
How Attached to the Labor Market Are the Long-Term Unemployed?
In this second post in our series on measuring labor market slack, we analyze the labor market outcomes of long-term unemployed workers to assess their employability and labor force attachment. If long-term unemployed workers are essentially nonparticipants, their job-finding prospects and attachment to the labor force should resemble those of nonparticipants who are not looking for a job and should differ considerably from those of short-term unemployed workers. Using data that allow us to follow workers over longer time periods, we find that differences in labor market outcomes between ...