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...