The U.S. economy added 321,000 jobs in November. While that number is startlingly high relative to just about any month in the last three years, it was not enough to push the unemployment rate needle--which still sits at 5.8%, according to the Department...

The John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University has released the results of a comprehensive study of long-term-unemployed Americans. In the report on the survey, Carl Van Horn , Cliff Zukin , and Allison Kopicki share grim...

We track the unemployment rate fairly closely. But we also make sure with each jobs report to look at the labor force participation rate, because that helps us better understand how many people are without work. In this video from the Brookings Institution...

What people have been politely calling "the unemployment situation" in the U.S. just got a bit better--at least as far as the central government data is concerned. The unemployment rate dropped to 6.1% in June, as the economy added 288,000 jobs...

While the growth rate is not very high, the US economy has been in recovery for quite some time now, though it may not feel that way to the large number of Americans who fall into the category of long-term unemployed. As persistent as unemployment and...

There was very little change to the US jobs picture in May, according to the Department of Labor . The unemployment rate is now at 8.2 percent after the economy added only 69,000 jobs during the month. The loss of jobs in the construction sector offset...

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...

In a new Economic Letter , San Francisco Fed researchers Sylvain Leduc and Zheng Liu , look at the impact of uncertainty on economic activity. As they display in the following figure, uncertainty is countercyclical (this figure shows perceived uncertainty...

The U.S. economy added 165,000 jobs in April, almost double the number added in March. And the unemployment rate edged down from 7.6% to 7.5%, according to the Department of Labor . The labor force participation rate remained at 63.3 percent. Here's...

The U.S. economy added 236,000 jobs in February, pushing the unemployment rate down to 7.7%, according to the Department of Labor . Employment expanded across most sectors, with Professional and business services adding 73,000 jobs. Employment in Construction...

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment report for December , released on Friday, the US unemployment rate has dropped to 9.4%. Good news, right? Not so much, says James Hamilton , writing at Econbrowser : Unfortunately, the household...

When we look at the Labor Department's monthly job reports, we make sure to take a close look at changes in the number of marginally attached workers and discouraged workers. The Atlanta Fed 's Dave Altig , John Robertson , and Ellyn Terry make...

If you can't wait three weeks for another jobs report, the Economic Populist has broken out some of the recent jobs data to give a more complete picture of the unemployment situation in the U.S. The first staggering statistic Economic Populist shares...

We wait for the first Friday of every month for the new jobs report, but recently the report has brought little news. Once again, figures for July show an "essentially unchanged" unemployment picture, according to the Department of Labor . The...

We had not fully thought about the term "waithood" until we watched this Ted Talk with Mohamed Ali , a human rights activist and entrepreneurship-advocate from Mogadishu, Somalia. Ali tells the story of a young boy in his native country who...

Jim Devine warns us to treat the news that the economy added more than 200,000 jobs last month "carefully." First of all, Devine points to the year-to-year growth, 194,000 jobs added, as a reminder that job creation overall has been quite slow...

The Brookings Panel on Economic Activity is under way in Washington today. You can take a look at the agenda here . Justin Wolfers and his colleagues have managed to put together a tempting mix of topics. Wolfers introduces two of today's discussions...

The International Monetary Fund has been in the headlines for pushing austerity measures the last several months, especially in struggling European economies. But yesterday IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn struck a different tone. In Oslo...

It looks like the U.S. economy gained another 200,000 or so jobs in December ( Labor Department numbers come out Friday). Moody's chief economist Mark Zandi told USA Today that "job gains are broad-based across industries, most notably in construction...

The US economy added 80,000 jobs in October, according to the latest numbers released by the Department of Labor . The unemployment rate dipped down slightly, to 9.0 percent. The professional and business services and leisure and hospitality sectors led...

The folks over at The Big Picture are beginning a new series called Jobs 2012. Their first post in the series went up today, and it is clear this series will provides some good data analysis to balance out all the noise that comes with the election season...

The Federal Reserve policy-making committee, the FOMC, has stated that it will continue on its current monetary policy course until there is "substantial improvement" in labor market conditions. So Cleveland Fed researchers Mark Schweitzer and...

In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times , Stephanie Kelton , associate professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the founder and editor of New Economic Perspectives , says we need to be careful what we wish for when it comes to...

Last week we pointed you to Erik Brynjolfsson 's optimistic TedTalk in which he argues that innovation will lead the global economy out of our current period of slow growth. Robert Gordon agrees that innovation is key to growth. But in his own TedTalk...

Unemployment in Europe ticked up last month. The unemployment rate reached 10.8% in February--up from 10.7% in January. It is not a big jump, but it is not the direction eurozone leaders are looking for. Take a look at this trend chart from Eurostat ...