Measuring Labor-force Participation and the Incidence and Duration of Unemployment

Series

Seminars Econometric Institute
Speaker(s)

James Hamilton (University of California San Diego, United States)
Field

Econometrics

Location

Erasmus University, TBA
Rotterdam
Date and time

May 16, 2019
16:00 - 17:00

Abstract:
The underlying data from which the U.S. unemployment rate, labor-force participation rate, and duration of unemployment are calculated contain numerous internal contradictions. This paper catalogs these inconsistencies and proposes a reconciliation. We find that the usual statistics understate the unemployment rate and the labor-force participation rate by about two percentage points on average and that the bias in the latter has increased since the Great Recession. The BLS estimate of the average duration of unemployment overstates by 50% the true duration of uninterrupted spells of unemployment and misrepresents what happened to average durations during the Great Recession and its recovery.
Co-author: Hie Joo Ahn (Federal Reserve Board)
url for the paper's location is here