Browse by Tags

Jeff Frankel , professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, says the "recession is over:" True, the magnitude of job loss after December 2007 was unparalleled since the 1930s. It was severe even relative to the loss of GDP. But contrary to some impressions, the labor market in this recovery has not lagged unusually far behind the rest of the economy. It always lags behind somewhat: due to costs of search, hiring and training, firms wait until the recovery is reasonably well established before adding workers to the payroll. But by either of two criteria, the lag has not been unusually long this time. First, the three months of greatest job loss virtually coincided with the three months of greatest output loss, centered on January or February of 2009, as had also been the the case in the 1991 and 2001 recessions. ( See graphs at Frankel's blog .) By June 2009 , job market indicators were showing their first signs of life. Second, with the latest figures, employment changes have now turned positive. This is the more definitive criterion, because a recovery is defined as a period of increasing economic activity, not a period when economic activity is high. The nine month wait was painful. But the lag between positive income growth (June 2009) and positive job growth (March 2010) turned out to be shorter than in the preceding two recessions (one to two years). Read Job Market Confirms End of Recession here . Mark Thoma , professor of economics at the University of Oregon, writes that we should pay attention to Frankel, since he is a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research's Business Cycle Dating Committee--which means he is part of the group that defines the dates of recessions. But Thoma is not so sure the latest jobs report is "encouraging" enough. Read Thoma's post here .