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Seminar

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