The authors find that the share of the labor force that is medium-term unemployed (five to 26 weeks unemployed) and the share working part time (less than 35 hours per week) involuntarily are strongly correlated with real wage growth. Moreover, they estimate that average real wage growth would...

This article explores new evidence from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) on the extent to which “house lock”--the reluctance of households to sell their homes in a declining house price environment--has contributed to the elevated unemployment rate...

For the unemployment rate to decline, the U.S. economy needs to generate above-trend job growth. We currently estimate trend employment growth to be around 80,000 jobs per month, and we expect it to decline over the remainder of the decade, due largely to changing labor force demographics and...

This article finds that a federal minimum wage hike would boost the real income and spending of minimum wage households. The impact could be sufficient to offset increasing consumer prices and declining real spending by most non-minimum-wage households and, therefore, lead to an increase in...

The authors conclude that just under half of the post-1999 decline in the U.S. labor force participation rate, or LFPR (the proportion of the working-age population that is employed or unemployed and seeking work), can be explained by long-running demographic patterns, such as the retirement of...

The authors examine how firms are adjusting their work force during the current recession in comparison with other recessions over the past 40 years.

In 2010, Congress passed the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the largest expansion of health insurance since the advent of Medicaid and Medicare roughly a half century ago. Because the law is being phased in slowly and many provisions are still years away from being launched, the law’s impact on...

Fewer teenagers are participating in the labor force today than at any point since WWII. At just under 44%, teen labor force participation is 15 percentage points below its peak in the late 1970s. Why has there been a long-run secular decline in the work activity of young adults, and why has it...