Economic development often founders on a mismatch between available workforce skills and companies’ needs. A tool that analyzes critical sets of labor market data not previously considered in tandem can help local governments improve planning.

Barry Bluestone, of the University of Massachusetts, and Teresa Ghilarducci, of the University of Notre Dame, show that although the poverty rate for elderly Americans has declined over the past three decades, the total number of persons in poverty has grown and the number of poor nonelderly...

Is the current labor market as tight as official statistics would seem to indicate? If incumbent workers increase their hours of work, it is irrelevant to the unemployment rate, but hardly irrelevant to the level of labor supply. Bluestone and Rose find that job insecurity and stagnating wages...

The proportion of workers earning low wages in the American economy declined from 1963 through 1979. Since 1979, both the low-wage and the high-wage shares of employment have increased, leading to wage polarization. Analysis of Current Population Survey data indicates that this occurred for both...

In this paper we demonstrate that because of stagnating wages and rising job insecurity, there has been a change in the labor supply regime in the U.S. macroeconomy since the 1970s. There is now greater labor supply at any given officially measured unemployment rate. This induced growth in the...