Search Results
Journal Article
Will labor force participation bounce back?
The most recent U.S. recession and recovery have been accompanied by a sharp decline in the labor force participation rate. The largest declines have occurred in states with the largest job losses. This suggests that some of the recent drop in the national labor force participation rate could be cyclical. Past recoveries show evidence of a similar cyclical relationship between changes in employment and participation, which could portend a moderation or reversal of the participation decline as the current recovery continues.
Journal Article
Measuring Labor Market Similarities in Nearby Regions
Labor market conditions are similar in regions that are near each other. This is called positive spatial correlation. Analyzing county-level data from 1990 to 2024 shows that commuting flows may contribute to strong spatial correlation in employment growth. Spatial correlation appears to have strengthened since the 1990s, at the same time as more workers were commuting across county lines. As these connections grow through commuting flows, both favorable and challenging conditions in local economies may become more likely to spread farther than in the past.
Working Paper
Cyclical and market determinants of involuntary part-time employment
We examine the determinants of involuntary part-time employment, focusing on variation associated with the business cycle and variation attributable to more persistent structural features of the labor market. Our theoretical framework distinguishes between workers? decision to seek part-time work and employer demand for part-time work hours, emphasizing demand and supply determinants of involuntary part-time work such as workplace technology, labor costs, and workforce demographics. We conduct regression analyses using state-level panel and individual data for the years 2003-2014. The results ...
Working Paper
Explaining Stagnation in the College Wage Premium
After growing substantially during the 1980s through the early 2000s, the college wage premium more recently has been largely unchanged, or stagnant. We extend the canonical production-function model of skill premiums to assess supply and demand contributions to the slowdown in college wage premium, using annual CPS ASEC data from the early 1960s through 2023. To account for the rising importance of women in the college educated workforce, we estimate a hybrid model that incorporates components that are disaggregated by age and gender. We also allow for non-linearities and changes over time ...
Journal Article
How Do Periods of Inflation, Recession Affect Real Earnings?
Households can lose spending power if they suffer job losses during recessions or when the cost of living rises at times of high inflation. One way to assess the historical roles these two factors have played in eroding economy-wide earnings is by breaking down the cumulative growth in inflation-adjusted household earnings into three components: nominal earnings growth, inflation, and employment growth. Analyzing the results suggests that periods of high inflation may undermine economy-wide real earnings growth more than mild recessions.
Journal Article
What’s behind the increase in part-time work?
Part-time work spiked during the recent recession and has stayed stubbornly high, raising concerns that elevated part-time employment represents a ?new normal? in the labor market. However, recent movements and current levels of part-time work are largely within historical norms, despite increases for selected demographic groups, such as prime-age workers with a high-school degree or less. In that respect, the continued high incidence of part-time work likely reflects a slow labor market recovery and does not portend permanent changes in the proportion of part-time jobs.
Journal Article
U.S. economic mobility: the dream and the data
Economic mobility is a core principle of the American narrative and the basis for the American Dream. However, research suggests that the United States may not be as mobile as Americans believe. The United States has high absolute mobility in the sense that children readily become richer than their parents. But the nation appears to fall short on relative mobility, which is the ability of children to change their rank in the income distribution relative to their parents. ; This Economic Letter is based on a presentation given by Mary Daly in April 2012.
Journal Article
Men’s Falling Labor Force Participation across Generations
The labor force participation rate for prime-age men has been declining for decades. About 14% of millennial males at age 25 are not in the labor force, compared with 7% of baby boomer males when they were that age. This generational gap declines substantially as groups approach middle age; the decline reflects that younger millennials enrolled in postsecondary education at higher rates and moved into the workforce later than prior generations. The convergence for millennial males suggests that the trend of men’s higher nonparticipation rates may slow in the future.
Journal Article
Falling College Wage Premiums by Race and Ethnicity
Workers with a college degree typically earn substantially more than workers with less education. This so-called college wage premium increased for several decades, but it has been flat to down in recent years and declined notably since the pandemic. Analysis indicates that this reflects an acceleration of wage gains for high school graduates rather than a slowdown for college graduates. This pattern is most evident for workers in racial and ethnic groups other than White, possibly reflecting an unusually tight labor market that may have altered their college attendance decisions.
Journal Article
The wage growth gap for recent college grads
Median starting wages of recent college graduates have not kept pace with median earnings for all workers over the past six years. This type of gap in wage growth also appeared after the 2001 recession and closed only late in the subsequent labor market recovery. However the wage gap in the current recovery is substantially larger and has lasted longer than in the past. The larger gap represents slow growth in starting salaries for graduates, rather than a shift in types of jobs, and reflects continued weakness in the demand for labor overall.