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Working Paper
Assessing the Change in Labor Market Conditions
This paper describes a dynamic factor model of 19 U.S. labor market indicators, covering the broad categories of unemployment and underemployment, employment, workweeks, wages, vacancies, hiring, layoffs, quits, and surveys of consumers? and businesses? perceptions. The resulting labor market conditions index (LMCI) is a useful tool for gauging the change in labor market conditions. In addition, the model provides a way to organize discussions of the signal value of different labor market indicators in situations when they might be sending diverse signals. The model takes the greatest signal ...
Working Paper
The Impact of the Age Distribution on Unemployment: Evidence from US States
Economists have studied the potential effects of shifts in the age distribution on the unemployment rate for more than 50 years. Most of this analysis uses a "shift-share" method, which assumes that the demographic structure has no indirect effects on age-specific unemployment rates. This paper uses state-level data to revisit the influence of the age distribution on unemployment in the United States. We examine demographic effects across the entire age distribution rather than just the youth share of the population — the focus of most previous work — and extend the date range of analysis ...
Working Paper
Job-to-job flows and the consequences of job separations
This paper extends the literature on the earnings losses of displaced workers to provide a more comprehensive picture of the earnings and employment outcomes for workers who separate. First, we compare workers who separate from distressed employers (presumably displaced workers) and those who separate from stable or growing employers. Second, we distinguish between workers who do and do not experience a spell of joblessness. Third, we examine the full distribution of earnings outcomes from separations - not the impact on only the average worker. We find that earnings outcomes depend much less ...
Journal Article
A Fracturing Wage Floor? Below-Minimum Wages in the Twenty-First Century
Recent data suggest a growing prevalence and magnitude of below-minimum wages, including minimum-wage violations, in the United States in the twenty-first century. In the 10 most populous states, the incidence of likely minimum wage violations reached its highest level in 2025. Among workers experiencing violations, the average amount of underpayment reached its highest level in 2023. In the Fourth Federal Reserve District, however, we observe notable deviations from national trends, with declining incidence of minimum-wage violations since 2007.
Working Paper
Part-Time for Economic Reasons During the Global Financial Crisis
Net flows from part-time for noneconomic reasons to part-time for economic reasons contributed substantially to the overall increase in part-time for economic reasons during the Global Financial Crisis in the United States. This suggests that the increase in measures such as U-6 may have overstated the decline in labor demand during that period. However, this does not appear to reflect a general cyclical pattern.
Working Paper
Assessing the Change in Labor Market Conditions
This paper describes a dynamic factor model of 19 U.S. labor market indicators, covering the broad categories of unemployment and underemployment, employment, workweeks, wages, vacancies, hiring, layoffs, quits, and surveys of consumers' and businesses' perceptions. The resulting labor market conditions index (LMCI) is a useful tool for gauging the change in labor market conditions. In addition, the model provides a way to organize discussions of the signal value of different labor market indicators in situations when they might be sending diverse signals. The model takes the greatest signal ...
Conference Paper
The effect of population aging on aggregate labor supply in the United States
Output growth is determined by growth in labor productivity and growth in labor input. Over the past two decades, technological developments have changed how many economists think about growth in labor productivity. However, in the coming decades, the aging of the population will change how economists think about the growth in labor input in the United States. As the oldest baby boomers born in 1946 turned 50, then 55, and then 60, an important economic change has slowly surfaced: these people have become less likely to participate in the labor force. While this shift was obscured by a labor ...
Working Paper
Minimum wage careers?
This paper investigates the extent to which people spend careers on minimum wage jobs. We find that a small but non-trivial number of NLSY respondents spend 25%, 50%, or even 75% of the first ten years of their career on minimum or near-minimum wage jobs. Workers with these minimum wage careers tend to be drawn from groups such as women, blacks, and the less-educated that are generally overrepresented in the low-wage population. The results indicate that lifetime incomes of some workers may be supported by a minimum wage. At the same time, these same groups would be disproportionately ...
Working Paper
Part-time work and industry growth
The impression that employment in the U.S. has become more part-time intensive may be driven by a tendency for faster-growing industries to use more part-time work. I document this association over 1983-1993, and demonstrate that it is robust to alternative measures. Similar relationships are discernable in several countries. However, the association does not emerge clearly in the U.S. until the 1980s. Moreover, both relative growth rates and relative part-time intensities of industries have changed markedly since 1940. Part-time work at fast-growing industries is not more likely to be ...