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Working Paper
Labor Force Participation: Recent Developments and Future Prospects
Since 2007, the labor force participation rate has fallen from about 66 percent to about 63 percent. The sources of this decline have been widely debated among academics and policymakers, with some arguing that the participation rate is depressed due to weak labor demand while others argue that the decline was inevitable due to structural forces such as the aging of the population. In this paper, we use a variety of approaches to assess reasons for the decline in participation. Although these approaches yield somewhat different estimates of the extent to which the recent decline in ...
Discussion Paper
The Effect of Labor Slack on Wages : Evidence from State-Level Relationships
Over the past several years, increases in most broad measures of wages have been quite muted, which many would consider symptomatic of weak demand for labor.
Discussion Paper
Using Cross-State Variation to Assess the Potential for Additional Improvement in Measures of Labor Market Conditions
While the national unemployment rate and the monthly change in payroll employment receive considerable attention among analysts seeking to assess the current state of the labor market, a broader range of labor market indicators are potentially also useful.
Working Paper
Changing Stability in U.S. Employment Relationships: A Tale of Two Tails
We examine how the distribution of employment tenure has changed in aggregate and for various demographic groups, drawing links to trends in job stability and satisfaction. The fraction of workers with short tenure (less than a year) has been falling since at least the mid-1990s, consistent with the decline in job changing documented over this period. The decline in short-tenure was widespread across demographic groups, industry, and occupation. It appears to be associated with fewer workers cycling among briefly-held jobs and coincides with an increase in perceived job security among short ...
Working Paper
Understanding Declining Fluidity in the U.S. Labor Market
We document a clear downward trend in labor market fluidity that is common across a variety of measures of worker and job turnover. This trend dates to at least the early 1980s if not somewhat earlier. Next we pull together evidence on a variety of hypotheses that might explain this downward trend. It is only partly related to population demographics and is not due to the secular shift in industrial composition. Moreover, the decline in labor market fluidity seems unlikely to have been caused by an improvement in worker-firm matching, the formalization of hiring practices, or an increase in ...
Working Paper
"The Great Retirement Boom": The Pandemic-Era Surge in Retirements and Implications for Future Labor Force Participation
As of October 2022, the retired share of the U.S. population was nearly 1-½ percentage points above its pre-pandemic level (after adjusting for updated population controls to the Current Population Survey), accounting for nearly all of the shortfall in the labor force participation rate. In this paper, we analyze the pandemic-era rise in retirements using a model that accounts for pre-pandemic trends in retirement, the cyclicality of retirement, and other factors. We show that: more than half of the increase in the retired share are “excess retirements†that would likely not ...
Working Paper
Labor Force Participation: Recent Developments and Future Prospects
Since 2007, the labor force participation rate has fallen from about 66 percent to about 63 percent. The sources of this decline have been widely debated among academics and policymakers, with some arguing that the participation rate is depressed due to weak labor demand while others argue that the decline was inevitable due to structural forces such as the aging of the population. In this paper, we use a variety of approaches to assess reasons for the decline in participation. Although these approaches yield somewhat different estimates of the extent to which the recent decline in ...
Working Paper
Changing Stability in U.S. Employment Relationships: A Tale of Two Tails
We confront two seemingly-contradictory observations about the US labor market: the rate at which workers change employers has declined since the 1980s, yet there is a commonly expressed view that long-term employment relationships are more difficult to attain. We reconcile these observations by examining how the distribution of employment tenure has changed in aggregate and for various demographic groups. We show that the fraction of workers with short tenure (less than a year) has been falling since the 1980s, consistent with the decline in job changing. Meanwhile, the fraction of workers ...
Working Paper
Polarization, immigration, education: What's behind the dramatic decline in youth employment?
Since the beginning of the recent recession, the employment-population ratio for high-school age youth (16-17 years old) has fallen by nearly a third, to its lowest level ever. However, this recession has exacerbated a longer-run downward trend that actually began in the 1990s and accelerated in the early 2000s. There is little research regarding why teen employment has fallen. Some earlier work emphasized labor supply explanations related to schooling and education, such as an increased emphasis on college preparation (Aaronson, Park, and Sullivan 2006), while others have argued that adult ...
Working Paper
The dynamics of labor market polarization
It has been well documented that the share of the working-age population employed in "middle-skill" occupations has been falling for some time, while the share in lower- and higher-skill jobs has been rising--i.e. "polarization" of the labor market (e.g. Autor 2010). However, the dynamics and related mechanism behind these employment trends are not fully understood; nor is it well understood what happens to workers who are displaced from middle-skill jobs. In this paper, I use data from the matched monthly CPS, the March CPS supplement, and the Displaced Worker Survey to answer two ...