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  • Pew Report on Young Workers: 'Young, Underemployed and Optimistic Coming of Age, Slowly, in a Tough Economy'

    If you hear young adults complaining about how tough it is to find fulfilling, long term employment, you may be tempted to think they are just feeling sorry for themselves. After all, times are tough on everyone, right? Well, yes and no. Times may be tough across all age groups, and yet most Americans, and most economists, agree that young workers have it particularly bad these days. According to a new report from the Pew Research Center , "There seems to be a near consensus among the public that today’s young adults face greater challenges than their parents did in reaching some of the most basic economic benchmarks." The report shares some details on how young adults have reacted to the economic downturn: Many young adults have felt the impact of the recession and sluggish recovery in tangible ways. Fully half (49%) of those ages 18 to 34 say that because of economic conditions over the past few years, they have taken a job they didn’t really want just to pay the bills. More than a third (35%) say they have gone back to school because of the bad economy. And one-in-four (24%) say they have taken an unpaid job to gain work experience. For some, tough economic times have had an impact on their personal life as well. Roughly a quarter of adults ages 18 to 34 (24%) say that, due to economic conditions, they have moved back in with their parents in recent years after living on their own. Among those ages 25 to 29, the share moving back home rises to 34%. Most adults under age 25 are enrolled in school at least part time (46% are full-time students). By age 25, the majority are out of school, but jobs and housing can be hard to come by, and many “boomerang” back home. And yet, they remain largely optimistic about their future. Take a look: Read the full report here .

  • Unemployment Rate now 8.3%

    The unemployment rate continues to edge downward. The US economy added 243,000 jobs in January, dropping the unemployment rate to 8.3 percent, according to the Department of Labor . The private sector added 257,000 jobs during the month. Here's a look at the unemployment trends from the Bureau of Labor Statistics : Here are some of the key data from other areas we like to track in the monthly jobs report: The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons, at 8.2 million, changed little in January. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job. In January, 2.8 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. Among the marginally attached, there were 1.1 million discouraged workers in January, little different from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.7 million persons marginally attached to the labor force in January had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities. Read the full report from the BLS here .

  • SF Fed: A Closer Look at Unemployment Duration

    In a new Economic Letter for the San Francisco Fed , Rob Valletta and Katherine Kuang take a look at unemployment duration, which has been much longer following the Great Recession than following previous recessions. Factors like the changing demographics of the workforce (age, mainly), and the extension of unemployment benefits may be factors, but the authors note that they have had only a small impact: The limited impact of workforce characteristics and extended UI suggests that other factors bear primary responsibility for the recent spike in unemployment duration. The most obvious one is the severity and persistence of employment losses compared with past recessions. Figure 2 shows employment patterns during and after the last four U.S. recessions, in each case measured relative to the pre-recession employment peak. At the recent employment trough in early 2010, employment was down 6.3%, compared with a cumulative decline of less than half that during the early 1980s. Moreover, employment has recovered little following the trough, growing on net by less than two percentage points through late 2011. That’s about 10 percentage points below the growth path from the early 1980s recession. It is likely that the recent pattern of massive job losses and a weak jobs recovery is the primary explanation for elevated unemployment duration. The contribution of these elements can be examined more formally by performing a regression, a standard statistical technique for measuring the relationships among variable factors. We follow the approach of Aaronson et al. (2010), who calculate the extent to which rising duration can be explained by changes in characteristics of the workforce. We extend their approach by incorporating measures of cumulative employment losses. For each month of CPS data on individual unemployment duration, we calculate the percentage change in payroll employment relative to the pre-recession peak and include it as an explanatory variable in our statistical exercise. We use payroll employment for each individual’s state of residence for this calculation (see Valletta 2011). The data used are for periods covering the latest recession and its aftermath, and the corresponding periods from the early 1980s recession. These are matched by counting months forward from the pre-recession employment peak. The recent duration data are adjusted for the 1994 and 2011 changes in survey measurement. Read Why Is Unemployment Duration So Long? here .

  • Javier Solana Calls on EU Leaders to Make Economic Growth the Top Priority

    With Europe's leaders meeting today to take on the difficult task of righting the EU economy , Javier Solana , former General Secretary of NATO and former EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, weighs in at Project Syndicate . Solana argues that the devotion to austerity measures has proven to be a limited solution, at best, to the EU's problems. "Austerity at all costs is a flawed strategy," Solana writes, and he believes that all efforts at this point should go into priming the pump for growth: Public debt, moreover, should not be demonized. It makes financial sense for states to share the cost of public investments, such as infrastructure projects or public services, with future generations, which will also benefit from them. Debt is the mechanism by which we institutionalize intergenerational solidarity. The problem is not debt, but ensuring that it finances productive investment, that it is kept within reasonable limits, and that it can be serviced with little difficulty. Yet, ominously, the same arguments that turned the 1929 financial crisis into the Great Depression are being used today in favor of austerity at all costs. We cannot allow history to repeat itself. Political leaders must take the initiative to avert an economically driven social crisis. Two actions are urgently needed. At a global level, more must be done to address macroeconomic imbalances and generate demand in surplus countries, including developed economies like Germany. Surplus emerging-market economies must understand that a prolonged contraction in the developed world creates a real danger of a global downturn at a time when they no longer retain the room for maneuver that they had four years ago. Within the eurozone, structural reforms and more efficient public spending, which are essential to sustainable long-term growth and debt levels, must be combined with policies to support demand and recovery in the short term. The steps taken in this direction by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are welcome but insufficient. What is needed is a grand bargain, with countries that lack policy credibility undertaking structural reforms without delay, in exchange for more room within the EU for growth-generating measures, even at the cost of higher short-term deficits. The world is facing unprecedented challenges. Never before in recent history has a deep recession coincided with seismic geopolitical change. The temptation to favor misguided national priorities could lead to disaster for all. Read Austerity vs. Europe here .

  • Unemployment Down to 8.5%

    The US economy added another 200,000 jobs in December, dropping the unemployment rate to 8.5 percent, according to the Department of Labor . This capped off a relatively strong end of 2011, as the unemployment rate has dropped by 0.6 since August. The US added 1.6 million jobs during 2011. Here's a look at the unemployment trends from the Bureau of Labor Statistics : Here are some of the key data from other areas we like to track in the monthly jobs report: The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) declined by 371,000 to 8.1 million in December. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job. About 2.5 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in December, little different from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. Among the marginally attached, there were 945,000 discouraged workers in December, a decrease of 373,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.6 million persons marginally attached to the labor force in December had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities. Read the full report from the BLS here .

  • Job Seekers to Available Jobs Ratio

    December has brought a small wave of positive news on the unemployment front--though much of it is better described as "less negative news." Lest we get carried away by dips in the unemployment rate and jobless claims, Economic Policy Institute economist Heidi Shierholz reminds us that the conditions are not ripe for a major shift. Shierholz points to the ratio of job seekers to available jobs, which remains above 4:1. Shierholz: To put this figure in context, it’s useful to note that the highest this ratio ever got in the early 2000s downturn was 2.8-to-1, and in December 2000, the month the JOLTS survey began, the ratio was 1.1-to-1. While the job-seekers ratio has been generally slowly improving since its peak of 6.9-to-1 in the summer of 2009, today’s data release marks two years and 10 months—147 weeks—that the ratio has been above 4-to-1. A job-seekers ratio of more than 4-to-1 means that for more than three out of four unemployed workers, there simply are no jobs. In October, there were 10.6 million more unemployed workers than job openings. Furthermore, the lack of job openings relative to unemployed workers is in no way limited to particular industries such as construction—unemployed workers dramatically outnumber job openings across the board, in every major industry. Read the full post here .

  • November Jobs Report: Unemployment Rate Drops to 8.6%

    The unemployment rate dropped to 8.6 percent as the US economy added 120,000 jobs in November, according to the latest numbers released by the Department of Labor . With 50,000 jobs added, the retail trade sector helped push job growth, The professional and business services , health care and leisure and hospitality sectors all had job growth during November. With 5,000 US Postal Service workers losing their jobs in November, government employment continued to decline. Here's a look at the unemployment trends from the Bureau of Labor Statistics : Here are some of the key data from other areas we like to track in the monthly jobs report: The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) dropped by 378,000 over the month to 8.5 million. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full- time job. In November, 2.6 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, about the same as a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. Among the marginally attached, there were 1.1 million discouraged workers in November, a decrease of 186,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.5 million persons marginally attached to the labor force in November had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities. Read the full report from the BLS here .

  • Planet Money Interactive Chart on Unemployment

    Planet Money has taken the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data on unemployment and put together a highly useful, but very simple, interactive chart to show unemployment trends across age groups. Here is a glimpse at the unemployment rate for people aged 20-24 who do not have a high school diploma: Click here to use the chart.

  • The Role of the Minimum Wage, A Mankiw Assignment

    Greg Mankiw poses an interesting question to his students, and the rest of us readers, on his blog. Essentially, we are being asked to evaluate the policy change to increase the minimum wage after 2007. And he shares the following data. Between 2007 and 2010... The percentage of all hourly-paid workers paid at or below the minimum wage rose from 2.3 to 6.0 percent. The percentage of part-time workers paid at or below the minimum wage rose from 5 to 14 percent. The percentage of teenage workers paid at or below the minimum wage rose from 7 to 25 percent. Read the assignment here . Antonio Fatás took a stab at the assignment. Fatás, a former student of Mankiw, is now a professor of economics at INSEAD . He points to a key characteristic of the period Mankiw isolates: Not only we have seen an increase in the minimum wage but also a deep recession. It is possible that some wages have fallen and old employees have been replaced by new ones who are now paid a lower wage - right at the level of the minimum wage. This would also cause an increase in the number of workers paid the minimum wage. But, of course, there is a potential second effect of a recession going in the opposite direction: it can be that during recessions those who lose their jobs are workers that are being paid lower wages and, as a result, you might see the percentage then decreasing as opposed to increasing. He plots out the variables in play: Fatás: As we can see this percentage has been decreasing since 1979. In that downward trend we also see three spikes: around 1991, around 1997 and 2008-10. The shape of this line, including the spikes correlate very well with the minimum wage (in green). It is measured in real terms (1996 dollars) and the scale is on the right hand side of my chart (the scale does not start at zero to see some meaningful variation). The real minimum wage has also been decreasing since 1979. A decrease that has been interrupted with increases in 1991, 1997 and 2007-09. These three increases coincide with the spikes in the blue line, the % of workers being paid the minimum wage. So the mechanical explanation is very visible in the chart, as you raise the minimum wage you see more workers being paid that rate. Read Minimum Wage and Unemployment for the full answer. Click here .

  • Over 100,000 Jobs Added in September, Unemployment Rate Remains at 9.1%

    Once again we have a jobs report from the Department of Labor where the unemployment remains unchanged. The unemployment rate remains at 9.1%, but in September, unlike in August, the economy did add jobs. Government employment went down again, but 103,000 more jobs were added in the private sector than were lost in the public sector. Here's a look at the unemployment trends from the Bureau of Labor Statistics : Here are some of the key data from other areas we like to track in the monthly jobs report: The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) rose to 9.3 million in September. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job. In September, about 2.5 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, about the same as a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. Among the marginally attached, there were 1.0 million discouraged workers in September, down by 172,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.5 million persons marginally attached to the labor force in September had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities. Read the full report from the BLS here .

  • Long Term Impact of Unemployment on Earnings

    Brookings has released a series of papers on the long term impact of unemployment on earnings. The subjects in the new issue of Brookings Papers on Economic Activity , include how government policy can help small businesses grow, and the effectiveness of quantitative easing. Justin Wolfers was one of the editors of the papers, and he provides a nice summary here :

  • Planet Money: The German Approach to Job Growth

    Unemployment in Germany is now at about 6 percent. That seems awfully low in today's global economic climate, but it seems high to Germans. And still, it took some painful maneuvering to get it that low. Planet Money took a trip over to Germany to learn more about the nation's ten year push to transform its labor market. That push helped the once stagnant manufacturing get going again, and in the process to produce more jobs. Take a listen (skip ahead to 02:30 for the story on Germany's unemployment):

  • Mark Zandi, Menzie Chinn, Analyze 'American Jobs Act'

    It is a bit trying to separate the economic anaylsis of President Obama's jobs speech and the proposed American Jobs Act , but some economists worked overnight to cut through the talk and look into the details. Mark Zandi , chief economist of Moody's , has come out with the headline worthy number of 1.9 million. That's how many jobs he says the jobs plan would add. He also projects GDP growth of an additional 2 points next year if the act is passed. You can read the analysis here (subscription required), or Politico's coverage of the report here . Menzie Chinn took a stab at textbook analysis of the president's proposals. At Econbrowser , Chinn writes that, following "textbook" thinking, the president was right to focus on the short run output gap, as demonstrated in the below figure: Using the CBO's measure of potential, the lost output has been $2.8 trillion (Ch.2005$) through 2011Q2. Using the WSJ mean forecast, another $1.4 trillion will be lost by 2012Q4. The CBO-implied output gap as of 2011Q2 is 7.1% (log terms). Using a cubic in time trendline, the gap is still 3.4% (and then one has to believe that output was above potential 3.3% in 2007Q3). Extended unemployment insurance, extension of the payroll tax holiday [CBPP], and infrastructure spending are all means by which aggregate demand can be sustained. To the extent that extended UI and payroll tax holiday benefit lower income/liquidity constrained individuals, the marginal propensity to consume is relatively high and hence the multiplier fairly large. Investment in infrastructure also makes a lot sense given the multiplier is fairly large for direct spending. Read Recovery, or Replaying 1937 (and 2008)? here .

  • August Jobs Report: Unemployment Rate Stays 9.1%, Jobs Flat

    The unemployment rate remains at 9.1%, as the US economy failed to add any jobs in August, according to the latest report from the Department of Labor . The private sectors continues to add jobs. Notably, health care, retail trade, manufacturing, and mining led the way in hiring, while the public sector continued to lose jobs. Here's a look at the unemployment trends from the Bureau of Labor Statistics : Here are some of the key data from other areas we like to track in the monthly jobs report: The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) rose from 8.4 million to 8.8 million in August. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job. About 2.6 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in August, up from 2.4 million a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. Among the marginally attached, there were 977,000 discouraged workers in August, down by 133,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.6 million persons marginally attached to the labor force in August had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities. Read the full report from the BLS here .

  • Gallup: 'Worries About Job Cutbacks Return to Record Highs'

    Gallup has released the new polling data today that shows nearly a third of all Americans are worried about losing their jobs. Americans were this worried about job stability two years ago, but concern dropped 5 points last year, according to Gallup. Even more Americans are concerned that they will lose benefits and/or pay: More from the report: With the U.S. unemployment rate running 50% higher than it was in 2008 (approximately 9% today vs. 6% then), American workers are again expressing record- or near-record-high levels of concern about the stability of their jobs and income. This reverses the slight improvement seen a year ago, when U.S. workers' concerns about losing a job, pay, or benefits had abated slightly. The rates of concern are even higher among workers who are the most vulnerable to financial setback -- those with low to moderate incomes. Together, the findings document the ongoing psychological impact of the country's economic problems on many working Americans and how fragile the economic recovery is in their eyes. When workers are worried about their jobs and their income more broadly, this is likely to affect broader economic confidence, the housing market, and consumer spending. Read the full report here .
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