Divergent Jobs Reports: Will the Real State of the Labor Market Please Stand Up?

The September employment report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) was predestined to create a significant amount of buzz. But the confluence of headline jobs growth at a modest clip of 114,000 and a surprisingly large 0.3 percentage point reduction in the unemployment rate has made the report more buzz-worthy than we (here at macroblog) expected. Although some of the commentary has been more heat than light, there have been some particularly good reminders of the difference between the establishment survey data, from which the headline jobs figure is derived, and the household survey data, from which come the unemployment statistics. The discussions on Greg Mankiw's blog and by Catherine Rampell (at The New York Times's Economix blog) are especially useful. Or, perhaps even better, you can go to the source at the BLS.

It's important to remember that both surveys are subject to error and, because of its much smaller sample size, the household survey can be subject to particularly sizeable swings. Specifically, the standard error of the household survey's monthly change in employment is 436,000(!). Based on the most extreme assumptions about flows in and out of unemployment and in and out of the labor force, understating or overstating actual employment by 436,000 would imply a measured unemployment rate ranging from 7.5 percent to 8.1 percent. (The BLS estimate of the standard error for unemployment puts a range on September's number of 7.6 percent to 8 percent.)

In his post, Greg Mankiw makes reference to a Brookings Institution paper by George Perry from a few years back that offers what is probably good advice: since both the payroll and household surveys are subject to error, and since the errors in each are likely unrelated to one another, the clearest picture about what is happening to employment in real time can be gleaned by combining information from both.

In fact, in a directional sense, both the household and payroll surveys are giving the same signals. In the table below, we compare the recent trends in monthly job gains measured in both surveys. The coverage in the two reports is slightly different. Unlike the payroll count, the household survey includes the self-employed and counts multiple jobs held by a single person as a single instance of employment. Because of this, the BLS also reports an adjusted version of the household survey, called the payroll concept adjusted employment measure. This payroll-consistent measure is designed to control for definitional differences across the household and establishment reports and also makes statistical adjustments for changes to the population controls in various years. So we include the data from this measure in the last column of the table.

Overall, all three measures suggest a weaker trend over the last six months than over the last nine months. All three measures also indicate that things were somewhat stronger on average in the last three months than in the prior three months. The bottom line in our view is that, though the employment levels can be quite different across the three measures, all suggest that the jobs picture has improved somewhat in the past three months.

The suggestion in George Perry's Brookings paper—combining the household and establishment data—can be implemented by constructing a weighted average of the two surveys. In our variation we put weights in proportion to the inverse of the sampling variability of the payroll and household surveys, which would roughly imply an 80 percent weight on the establishment measure and 20 percent on the payroll-consistent household measure. The estimates using these weights are reported in the last column of the table above. Because the component employment measures display directionally similar trends in recent months, the weighted average does as well. 

In a speech given a few weeks ago, Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart, our boss here, offered the opinion that

Taking a two-year view, the trend rate of gains in employment has been roughly 150,000 per month. This pace would be sufficient, at current levels of participation in the workforce, to sustain a steady, gradual reduction of the unemployment rate.

As the September employment reports show, predicting the unemployment rate month to month can be tricky business, and there may be better ways than just extrapolating from the jobs data. But thus far we are inclined to think that slow but steady progress on the jobs front is still the best story.

By Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed

The Decline in Unemployment: Any Silver Lining?

Among the somewhat dreary jobs report released last Friday, there was one potential bright spot—the unemployment rate declined from 8.25 percent in July to 8.11 percent in August. Of course, determining whether this is a true bright spot requires delving further into the numbers, and the determination depends on what happened to those people once they were no longer counted among the jobless. Did they get jobs? Some did, but an unusually large number of them simply left the labor force—the labor force participation rate hit a new post-1980 low, leaving some doubt about whether the cloudy employment report had any silver lining at all.

To detail the situation, the unemployment rate dropped from 8.25 percent in July to 8.11 percent in August, driven by a 250,000-person drop in the number of unemployed between July and August (a 1.95 percent drop). This is the largest decline in the number of unemployed since January 2011 and almost 2.5 times larger than the average monthly decline seen from July 2011 to July 2012 (103,500).

Where did those formerly unemployed people go? To get at this issue, I went to the Current Population Survey (or CPS, from where the unemployment statistics come) to examine the flows of people into and out of the labor force, and into and out of employment and unemployment. From July to August, the CPS data in the chart below reveal that approximately 60 percent of the unemployed remained in unemployment (blue line). Of the remaining 40 percent, over half (54 percent) of the unemployed flowed out of the labor force in August (red line) while the other 46 percent (green line) flowed into employment.

It is interesting to note that the share of exits to employment fell below the exits out of the labor force for the first time in the last few months of 2008 and has remained so throughout the recovery.

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Although the share exiting the labor force from unemployment has not increased, the number of individuals leaving unemployment because they leave the labor force has been on the rise since May, as the chart below shows:

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This increase in the number of individuals exiting the labor force from unemployment, of course, leads to obvious concerns that lower unemployment may be a result of a rise in the number of workers who have simply become too discouraged to continue seeking employment. As financial writer Mark Gongloff points out:

The majority's reaction to these numbers on Friday was that they were an awful sign, that the job market is so bad that hundreds of thousands of people every month are simply giving up in despair. We have growing numbers of people sitting around doing nothing, losing their job skills and their ability to buy stuff.

Perhaps that's a bit too pessimistic. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does track people who have dropped out of the labor force but who have looked for work sometime in the last 12 months and report that they are available to work. The BLS also asks these individuals—referred to as the "marginally attached"—if they consider themselves as having left the job-search process because they are discouraged.

To begin with, it is important to realize the scale of the problem: the number of discouraged, marginally attached people corresponds to less than 7 percent of the unemployed and approximately 1 percent of those not in the labor force. More importantly, we can see from the reported data in the chart below that the share has been on a downward trend and is now close to prerecession levels.

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If the share of nonparticipants who indicate they want to work but are discouraged is declining and relatively small, what about other nonparticipants? It's a good question, and in a previous macroblog post my coauthor Julie Hotchkiss discussed research presented in an Atlanta Fed FRBA working paper (coauthored with Fernando Rios-Avila) that attempts to get to this question.

First, we found that approximately 70 percent of those under age 25 indicate that the reason they are not in the labor force is because they are in school, a rate that has not changed with the rather dramatic decline in participation seen in the last decade and during the recession and recovery.

In prime working age—the cohort 25 to 54 years old—household care is the dominant reason individuals indicate they are out of the labor force. But in terms of changes in the numbers of people out of the labor force in this age group, we found significant increases only for the shares who indicated they were out of the labor force for schooling and for "other," or unspecified, reasons.

As Julie concluded in her earlier post, for those in school, the expectation is that they are accumulating skills and they will enter/reenter the labor force with higher levels of human capital. While there could be some concern over atrophy of skill for those individuals in the "other" category, the evidence suggests that for a large share of these individuals, the nonparticipation is not permanent, as roughly 45 percent of individuals in that category transition back into the labor force within a year—a rate that is increasing during the recovery.

A small ray of hope, perhaps, but hope nonetheless.

By Melinda Pitts, a research economist and associate policy adviser in the Atlanta Fed's research department

The (Unfortunately?) Consistent Record of the Recovery

In his last two posts (here and here), economist Tim Duy has done some yeoman work displaying and discussing the economic context of monetary policy decisions past and prospective. Though Wednesday's self-titled post "Data Dump" focuses on the incoming data as a set-up to the next meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), what strikes me is the consistency of the broad macroeconomic outcomes over the course of the recovery. Gross domestic product (GDP) growth has pretty clearly clocked in at about 2 percent...

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...and, looking through the quarterly ups and downs, payroll employment growth has clearly trended near 150,000 jobs per month after a slower start in 2010:

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The inflation picture shows more variation...

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...but in my view, that sort of variation is why it makes sense to think in terms of medium-term performance. "Medium-term" is more a measure of art than science, and I would concede the point that the recovery as a whole would be on the shorter end of that time frame. Suffice it to say that the pace of price-level growth over the past two and a half years wouldn't contradict the presumption that inflation is pretty close to the FOMC's stated longer-run objective.

Duy looks at this performance and sees pretty clear evidence of failure:

The economy continues to settle into a path that is not consistent with either part of the Fed's dual mandate. Moreover, there are very real downside risks to even a tepid outlook...

This is frustrating. What in the world is the point of making a big claim to affirm the nature of the dual mandate and then subsequently ignore any forecasts that indicate you have no faith the elements of the dual mandate will be met anytime soon?

That complaint is not really about the inflation part of the mandate, but the employment/growth part of it. But if you are willing to accept that employment growth remains on a pace of 150,000 jobs per month—and I see no clear evidence to the contrary—it is not at all obvious that the pace of the recovery is inconsistent with the FOMC's view of achieving its dual mandate. Here, for example, are the central tendency ranges of the unemployment rate projections from the FOMC's June Summary of Economic Projections (SEP) and the employment growth that would be required to meet those objectives (with some important assumptions, such as the labor force participation rate remaining at the current level).

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Here is the important statement of conditionality, as described in the SEP document:

The charts show actual values and projections for three economic variables [GDP growth, the unemployment rate, and PCE inflation] based on FOMC participants' individual assessments of appropriate monetary policy.

Under appropriate policy—which pretty clearly means mandate-consistent outcomes—the majority of FOMC participants don't seem to think that the unemployment rate will improve that quickly. And, to my point, it is not clear that the trend in payroll employment is inconsistent with that pace of improvement.

Of course, individual contributors to the SEP may have different assumptions about things like the labor force participation rate. More importantly, the SEP is silent on what, in each contributor's view, constitutes "appropriate policy."

And I am certainly begging the important issues. Would the economy have achieved even the somewhat unspectacular pace of 2 percent GDP growth, 150,000 jobs per month, and average inflation near the long-run objective absent large-scale asset purchases ("QE2"), forward guidance (statements indicating that policy rates are expected to be exceptionally low through at least late 2014), and maturity extension programs ("Operation Twist")? Does "appropriate policy" imply that more must be done to achieve even the modest progress in the unemployment rate implied in my calculations above? And could we have (looking backward) or can we (looking forward) do even better with an even more aggressive approach, as many Fed critics argue?

Good questions, those.

By Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed

 

Employment growth and the FOMC Summary of Economic Projections

Here at macroblog we are always keen for an excuse to play with the Atlanta Fed's Jobs Calculator, and Wednesday's release of the Summary of Economic Projections (SEP) from the most recent meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) provides the perfect opportunity. The SEP, as you know, offers up three-year (and longer-run) projections of growth in gross domestic product (GDP), inflation measured by the personal consumption expenditure index (both headline and core), and the unemployment rate.

The SEP does not directly provide information on employment growth, and each of the 19 FOMC participants among the seven governors and 12 Federal Reserve Bank presidents will have their own views about how all the dots connect between GDP growth, unemployment, and job creation. I don't presume to speak for any of them, but with a few assumptions we can get a ballpark sense of how the range of unemployment rate projections might map into payroll job changes.

Assume, for example, that the labor force participation rate—the share of the working population that is either employed or actively seeking work—remains at its May level of 63.8 percent through 2014. In this case, the "central tendency" range of unemployment rate projections implies the following:

As a frame of reference, here is the recent employment record in the United States:

Overall, the hypothetical job growth based on SEP projections looks reasonably consistent with the employment experience of the last year and a half or so. If you yourself are inclined to think that the 2011 experience or the 12-month trend represent the most likely pace for the job growth going forward, you would probably find yourself in agreement with the lower unemployment numbers in the SEP. If you are convinced that the past three months represent a persistent downshift in the pace of job creation, you probably align with the higher end of the projections.

All of these calculations depend on my assumption about the labor force participation rate, and we along with many others have been warning that a constant participation rate may not be in the cards. Interested readers can go to the calculator and plug in their own participation rate assumptions and see how the resulting jobs numbers change. Our sense is that the participation rate is most likely to rise, which would count as a risk that the calculations above understate the job growth needed to hit the indicated ranges for the unemployment rate. On the other hand, some have argued that the expiration of extended unemployment benefits will actually lower the participation rate, as some people will simply drop out of the labor force. Declines in the participation rate would lower the job creation needed to support the unemployment rate projections in the SEP.

We'll see, but barring the participation complication, the unemployment rate projections on their face look pretty consistent with the same sort of progress on the job creation front that we have seen over the past couple of years. For better and worse.

By Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed

The armchair Fed historian

I enjoy researching economic history—some of my work with Steve Quinn on early central banking is here, here, and here.

The only problem with historical research, though, is that it tends to involve some real work—long hours spent with dusty archival volumes, consumption of lots of coffee and antihistamines, and a steady hand on the digital camera.

Just recently—and somewhat belatedly—I became aware of a Google application (thanks to Benjamin Guilbert's blog) that lets would-be economic historians breeze over the rough stuff and do some interesting research from their own computer keyboards. The application is called Ngrams, and here's how it works.

Basically, Ngrams counts occurrences of words in books that have been scanned by Google into its Google Books database. It then plots out the frequencies of these words as annual time series. These plots can then be used to measure how interest in a topic varies over time—to construct "cultural histories."

There are some limitations to this technique, mostly related to unavoidable issues in Google's database. For example, the dataset I chose to work with covers only English-language publications and stops in mid-2009. (See the Ngrams website for more detailed information.)

The six charts below represent a first attempt to use Ngrams to delve into the cultural history of the Federal Reserve.

Question 1: How popular is the Federal Reserve as a discussion topic compared with other central banks?

• Search terms: Bank of England, Federal Reserve, Reichsbank, Bundesbank, Bank of Japan
• Time period: 1900–2008

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• My interpretation: almost from its beginning in 1913, the Federal Reserve has been the primary focus of English-language writing on central banks.

Question: 2 The Fed was founded as a means to counteract banking panics. What has been the impact of the Fed on the discussion of panics?

• Search term: bank panic
• Time period: 1866–2008

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• My interpretation: that bank panics were widely discussed in the wake of three National Banking Era panics in 1873, 1893, and 1907, no surprise. Interest in bank panics peaked following the widespread bank failures of the early 1930s. This topic became less popular after World War II, but interest reawakened with the numerous savings and loan failures of the 1980s and early 1990s.

Question 3: One of the early policy goals of the Fed was to improve the efficiency of the check payment system. When did use of checks become the norm for ordinary Americans?

• Search terms: pay envelope, pay check, paycheck
• Time period: 1900–2008

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• My interpretation: in 1920, most people did not have checking accounts and were paid in envelopes stuffed with cash. By 1960, most households had checking accounts and were paid by "pay check," later contracted to "paycheck."

Question 4. What has been the impact of the Fed on people's concerns about inflation and unemployment?

• Search terms: unemployment, inflation
• Time period: 1900–2008

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• My interpretation: interest in unemployment shot up during the Great Depression, fell back in the postwar years, but resurged in the 1970s. Discussion of unemployment then falls steadily to the end of the sample in 2008. Inflation was rarely discussed until the United States left the gold standard in 1933. Interest in inflation remained below unemployment until inflation began to accelerate in the 1970s. Since about 1980, interest in these two topics has been almost identical.

Question 5: In the mind of the public, which policy goal should the Fed be most concerned with: price stability, financial stability, or employment?

• Search terms: price stability, financial stability, Phillips curve (as an imperfect proxy for "employment"; note that the original article by William Phillips appeared in 1958)
• Time period: 1900–2008

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• My interpretation: financial stability was paramount until after the 1951 Treasury-Fed Accord. Price stability then takes center stage until the turn of the 21st century but by 2008 had converged with financial stability. Interest in the Phillips curve seems to have peaked in the early 1980s.

Question 6: What has been the impact of two "big ideas" on monetary policy, proposed by Robert E. Lucas (1976) and John B. Taylor (1993)?

• Search terms: Lucas critique, Taylor rule
• Time period: 1970–2008

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• My interpretation: in his 1976 paper, Lucas argued that there were limits on the usefulness of statistical relationships (the Phillips curve in particular) in monetary policymaking. Partly in response to the Lucas critique, Taylor in 1993 proposed that central banks follow a simple rule in setting short-term interest rates. Interestingly, discussion of the Lucas critique peaked around the time of the publication of Taylor's paper. Interest in the Taylor rule was still growing at the end of the sample in 2008.

You may or may not agree with the choice of search terms or the interpretations of the search results, but you are welcome to conduct your own historical research with the same application—all from the comfort of your armchair, no digital camera required. We'll have more of these cultural histories to share in later posts.

By Will Roberds, research economist and senior policy adviser at the Atlanta Fed

The skills gap: Still trying to separate myth from fact

Peter Capelli has looked at the skills gap explanation for labor market weakness and sees more myth than fact:

"Indeed, some of the most puzzling stories to come out of the Great Recession are the many claims by employers that they cannot find qualified applicants to fill their jobs, despite the millions of unemployed who are seeking work. Beyond the anecdotes themselves is survey evidence, most recently from Manpower, which finds roughly half of employers reporting trouble filling their vacancies.

"The first thing that makes me wonder about the supposed 'skill gap' is that, when pressed for more evidence, roughly 10% of employers admit that the problem is really that the candidates they want won't accept the positions at the wage level being offered. That's not a skill shortage, it's simply being unwilling to pay the going price."

To some extent, the issue is semantic:

"But the heart of the real story about employer difficulties in hiring can be seen in the Manpower data showing that only 15% of employers who say they see a skill shortage say that the issue is a lack of candidate knowledge, which is what we'd normally think of as skill. Instead, by far the most important shortfall they see in candidates is a lack of experience doing similar jobs. Employers are not looking to hire entry-level applicants right out of school. They want experienced candidates who can contribute immediately with no training or start-up time..."

In the language of economists, Capelli is defining skill as the possession of generalized human capital, while businesses are defining skill as the possession of firm- or job-specific human capital. In more familiar language, Capelli appears to be focused on innate skill levels and education, while businesses are looking for the types of skills that would be attained through past on-the-job training. In even more colloquial language, Capelli wants businesses to appreciate book-learning, and businesses prefer those who have already survived the school of hard knocks.

We have recently completed our own version of the Manpower survey Capelli references. Our results are based on the responses of about 100 businesses in the Sixth Federal Reserve District represented by the Atlanta Fed, and we do not claim that they are conclusive. But we do think they are instructive.

Of those firms that said they experienced an increase in hiring difficulty over the last year, our poll respondents confirm the notion that businesses are looking for candidates with specific skills:

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The lack of technical skills is the only factor that really jumps out as an issue that businesses have with the pool of job applicants. We often hear anecdotal complaints about job seekers' lack of "soft skills," or the difficulty in finding applicants who can pass required background checks. But only 14 percent of all selections indicated too few applicants with required interpersonal skills, and only 7 percent indicated a problem with applicants passing screening requirements like drug-use or credit checks.

On the other hand, our poll found scant support for Capelli's claim that businesses are "unwilling to pay the going price." Only 9 percent of respondents reported that too few applicants would accept the offered compensation package.

Despite the fact that we see some evidence consistent with skill mismatch, it is far from clear that this issue is the smoking gun that explains the current anemic state of job growth. When asked if a dearth of skilled applicants is a persistent problem, our survey respondents overwhelmingly answer "yes." But when asked if they have had more difficulty hiring over the past 12 months, the overwhelming majority answered "no":

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Even among the minority of businesses that report recent hiring difficulties, only half indicate that this difficulty is restraining growth:

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We infer a couple of lessons from all of this information. First, it does appear that there is a long-term skill level problem in the U.S. economy. Adopting Capelli's definition of skill does not mean the existence of skill mismatch is a myth.

But turning to the short run, we've been pretty sympathetic to structural explanations for the slow pace of the recovery. Nonetheless, we have yet to find much evidence that problems with skill-mismatch are more important postrecession than they were prerecession. We'll keep looking, but—as our colleagues at the Chicago Fed conclude in their most recent Chicago Fed Letter—so far the facts just don't support skill gaps as the major source of our current labor market woes.

By Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed, and

John Robertson, vice president and senior economist in the Atlanta Fed's research department

Will labor force participation continue to rise?

The labor force participation rate ticked up in May, as did the rate of unemployment. As we have noted in the past, the near-term trajectory of the unemployment rate depends critically on what happens to the participation rate. So the question is, can we expect further upward changes in the participation rate? The answer depends a lot on the labor market attachment of those that are currently out of the labor force.

A few weeks ago, my frequent coauthor, Julie Hotchkiss, wrote about what we can gain from detailed labor market data about the activities of people who have exited the labor force. In her posting, she discussed the overall increase in exits from the labor force, with a focus on 25–54 year olds. Her work concluded that while people identified "Household Care" as the dominant activity for those not in the labor force, there has been a significant upward shift since the recession in those indicating "School" or "Other" as their primary reason for not being in the labor force. A supposition is that at least those that indicated they were in school would reenter the labor force at some point, doing so with a higher level of skills or, at least, with skills that are better aligned with labor demand. However, because we know little about those in the Other category, the future labor market attachment for them is less clear.

This post explores data on transitions into the labor force, primarily for those in the Other category. As in the earlier blog, the focus is on individuals aged 25–54, as retirement dominates the activity of older individuals not in the labor force and schooling dominates the activity of younger individuals not in the labor force.

One indicator of whether those in the Other group are planning to reenter the labor force is whether the individuals in this group are classified as marginally attached to the labor force. A nonparticipant who is marginally attached indicates they want employment or are available for employment. Also, they indicate having looked for a job in the previous year but not actively looking for a job at present. Using monthly data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) that are matched year over year, we see that the marginally attached workers do transition back into the labor force at twice the rate of all individuals who are not in the labor force, as chart 1 illustrates. These rates are relatively stable over time.

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As chart 2 shows, a much higher proportion of individuals in the Other category are marginally attached to the labor force, compared to other types of nonparticipants. Moreover, the percentage of these marginally attached nonparticipants has increased from around 20 percent to 30 percent over the last three years.

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This higher probability of marginally attached workers returning to the labor force combined with the significantly increased share of marginally attached workers in the Other category suggests that we should expect to find a higher share of those in the Other group returning to the labor force than we've seen in the past. But it turns out that this expected development is not what has happened. The Other group also includes individuals who are not marginally attached to the labor market, and their transition rates into the labor market have declined. On net, while the transition rate to employment is highest for the Other category (reflecting the large of share of marginally attached), the transition rate into the labor force does not fully reflect the increased level of marginal attachment to the labor force.

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The group with the next highest transition rate to employment is in the School category, which reflects the inherent transitory nature of that activity. However, it is noteworthy that the school transition rate is lower than it was before the recession. This development reflects an increase in the share of individuals continuing to indicate that school is their primary reason for not participating in the labor force from one year to the next. And it suggests that the lower opportunity cost of attending school is influencing the decision to remain in school longer.

While these trends suggest that we could expect to see higher rates of return to the labor force going forward, this potential development will likely require a much better showing of jobs numbers than were seen today before kicking in.

By Melinda Pitts, research economist and associate policy adviser

Labor force nonparticipants: So what are they doing?

As Dave Altig, Atlanta Fed research director, pointed out earlier this week in this blog post, there is a great deal of interest these days in the labor force participation rate—particularly its level and the direction it's going. The question that seems to be on everyone's mind is how many of the nonparticipants in the labor force can we expect to return to the market. The answer to this question has immediate implications for the unemployment rate (especially if all these nonparticipants were to return to unemployment rolls), and longer-term implications for economic growth—our economy needs workers to fuel production.

The analyses that I can find to date are all primarily focused on a statistical detangling of demographic versus behavioral changes, structural versus cyclical changes, and employment trend versus employment gap debates. But all of this discussion begs the question that my colleague, Melinda Pitts, and I have been investigating: What are these labor force nonparticipants doing? Perhaps an answer to that question will help us get a better handle on which nonparticipants are likely to return to the labor force in the near future.

The Current Population Survey (CPS), administered by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), asks labor force nonparticipants about their reason for absence (details of the CPS questionnaire are available from the NBER). The reason given by nonparticipants that gets most of the attention is "discouraged over job prospects." In April 2012, these people accounted for only 1.1 percent of all nonparticipants (41 percent of the marginally attached—those who want a job, are available to work, and searched in the previous year). The vast majority of nonparticipants are absent because of retirement, disability, going to school, caring for household members, or other reasons.

Using the latest survey data we have available (November 2011), we find that most nonparticipants are retired (48 percent); the share who are in school, disabled, or taking care of household members are 18 percent, 16 percent, and 15 percent, respectively; and the share in the category termed "Other" comes in at about 2 percent.

For purposes of better understanding the decline in labor force participation, however, we look at the reasons for absence given by people who leave the labor force. Those who have left the labor force are arguably more likely to return (depending on the reason, of course) than those who have never been in the labor force. A feature of the CPS allows us to track certain individuals from one year to the next, so we are able to identify people who leave the labor force. Chart 1 illustrates how individuals who are not in the labor force—but who were employed or unemployed the previous year—are distributed across the reasons for nonparticipation. The raw data are not seasonally adjusted, of course, so we plot the numbers as a 12-month moving average—this approach does not affect the overall observed trends in the data. In addition, we restrict our analysis here to those between the ages of 25 and 54, since retirement overwhelmingly dominates the nonparticipation decisions of older workers, and schooling dominates the nonparticipation decisions of younger workers.

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Chart 1 illustrates what the labor force participation rates have been telling us. For every reason given for absence, except perhaps "Retired," the number of people leaving the labor force has increased during or after the recession of 2008. The most dramatic increases are seen among those people giving "School" and "Other" as a reason. However, since we are in search of changes in reasons that might be out of the ordinary, especially any significant upward shifts in nonparticipants giving a particular reason during and after the recession, we also look at how these folks leaving the labor force are distributed across the different reasons. This information will tell us whether the number of people giving one particular reason increased disproportionately compared with the other reasons.

Chart 2 plots the shares of all of those leaving the labor force (ages 25–54) giving each reason for their absence. Since the beginning of the recession, there has been a significant shift toward the reasons of "School" and "Other" among nonparticipants who have left the labor force within the previous year. The share levels attained by the reasons of "School" and "Other" are historically unprecedented by the end of the data series. These shifts also appear to have come mostly from a decline in the share of people leaving the workforce to take care of household members (HHcare). This is evidenced through the dramatic drop in the share giving the "HHcare" reason at the same time.

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It is difficult to interpret the implications of the rise in share of "Other" as a reason for nonparticipation among those leaving the labor force, although this category may be capturing some of the discouraged workers. The implication for the rise in "School" is unmistakable, however. With reasonable expectations, these individuals should re-enter the labor force with enhanced—or at least better-aligned—skills that will be able to make a positive contribution to overall economic growth.

By Julie Hotchkiss, research economist and policy adviser in the Atlanta Fed's research department

 

A take on labor force participation and the unemployment rate

By now, if you've been paying attention to the coverage following the April employment report, you know the following:

• The March to April decline in the unemployment rate from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent was arithmetically driven by yet another decline in the labor force participation rate (LFPR).
• The decline in the LFPR, now at its lowest level since the early 1980s, is itself being influenced by a confounding mix of demographic change and other behavioral changes that nobody seems to understand—a point emphasized by a gaggle of blogs and bloggers such as Brad DeLong, Carpe Diem, Conversable Economist, Free Exchange, and Rortybomb, to name a few.

With respect to the first observation, in a previous post my colleague Julie Hotchkiss described how to use our Jobs Calculator to get a ballpark sense of what the unemployment rate would have been had the LFPR not changed. If you follow those procedures and assume that the LFPR had stayed at the March level of 63.8 percent instead of falling to 63.6 percent, the unemployment rate would have risen to 8.4 percent instead of falling to 8.1 percent.

It is clear that interpreting this sort of counterfactual experiment depends critically on how you think about the decline in the LFPR. The aforementioned post at Rortybomb cites two Federal Reserve studies—from the Chicago Fed and the Kansas City Fed—that attempt to disentangle the change in the LFPR that can be explained by trends in the age and composition of the labor force. These changes are presumably permanent and have little to do with questions of whether the labor market is performing up to snuff.

The following chart, which throws our own estimates into the mix, illustrates the evolution of the actual LFPR along with an estimate of the LFPR adjusted for demographic changes:

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As the header on the chart indicates, our estimates suggest that roughly 40 percent of the change in the LFPR since 2000 can be accounted for by changes in age and composition of the population—in essentially the same range as the Chicago and Kansas City Fed studies. (If you are interested in the technical details you can find a description of the methodology used to generate the chart above, based on work by the University of Chicago's Rob Shimer.

In other words, 0.9 percentage points of the decline in the LFPR since the beginning of the past recession can be explained by demographic trends (as the baby boomers age, the labor force will grow more slowly than the total population [ages 16 and up]). Subtracting the demographic trends still leaves 1.5 percentage points to be explained, a number right in line with Brad DeLong's back-of-the-envelope calculation of "cyclical" LFPR change.

As DeLong's comments make clear, the interpretation of the nondemographic piece of the LFPR change requires, well, interpretation. And the consequences of connecting the dots between changes in the unemployment rate and broader labor market performance are enormous.

In the recently released Summary of Economic Projections following the last meeting of the Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee, the midpoint of the projections for the unemployment rate at the end of 2013 is 7.5 percent. Turning again to our Jobs Calculator, we can get a sense of what sort of job creation over the next 20 months will be required given different values of the LFPR. For these estimates, I consider three alternatives: The LFPR stays at its April level, the LFPR reverts to our current estimate of the demographically adjusted level (that is, increases by 1.5 percentage points), and an intermediate case in which the LFPR increases by 0.7 percentage points—the lower end of DeLong's estimate of "people who really ought to be in the labor force right now, but who are not."

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DeLong asks:

"Are [people who really ought to be in the labor force right now, but who are not] now part of the 'structurally' non-employed who we will never see back at work, barring a high-pressure economy of a kind we see at most once in a generation?"

As you can see, the answer to that question matters a lot to how we should think about progress on the unemployment rate going forward.

By Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed

 

Is the composition of job growth behind slow income growth?

Harold Meyerson, Washington Post opinion writer, channels a Bloomberg report (via The Big Picture), and thinks he finds a smoking gun:

"Why is this recovery different from all other recoveries?

"... what really sets the current recovery apart from all its predecessors is this: Almost three years after economic growth resumed, the real value of Americans' paychecks is stubbornly still shrinking. According to Friday's Bloomberg Economics Brief, ‘the pace of income gains is well below that of the past two jobless recoveries and real average hourly earnings continue to decline.'

"The Bloomberg report cites one reason for this anomaly: Most of the jobs being created are in low-wage sectors. According to Bloomberg, fully 70 percent of all job gains in the past six months were concentrated in restaurants and hotels, health care and home health care, retail trade, and temporary employment agencies. These four sectors employ just 29 percent of the country's workforce but account for the vast majority of the jobs being created."

Meyerson accurately repeats the Bloomberg story, but that story itself is somewhat misleading. To begin with, the 70 percent figure appears to include the entire category of professional and business services, of which temporary help services are only a part. The types of jobs that fall under the professional and business service label are broadly described by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and include employment in scientific and technical services, management jobs as well as administrative and support type jobs. In particular, the professional scientific and technical services sector is described as follows...

"The Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services sector comprises establishments that specialize in performing professional, scientific, and technical activities for others. These activities require a high degree of expertise and training. The establishments in this sector specialize according to expertise and provide these services to clients in a variety of industries and, in some cases, to households. Activities performed include: legal advice and representation; accounting, bookkeeping, and payroll services; architectural, engineering, and specialized design services; computer services; consulting services; research services; advertising services; photographic services; translation and interpretation services; veterinary services; and other professional, scientific, and technical services."

... and here is the description of management of companies and enterprises sector:

"The Management of Companies and Enterprises sector comprises (1) establishments that hold the securities of (or other equity interests in) companies and enterprises for the purpose of owning a controlling interest or influencing management decisions or (2) establishments (except government establishments) that administer, oversee, and manage establishments of the company or enterprise and that normally undertake the strategic or organizational planning and decision making role of the company or enterprise. Establishments that administer, oversee, and manage may hold the securities of the company or enterprise."

These parts of the economy are hardly made up of the prototypical low-wage jobs and, according to my calculations, you don't get to Bloomberg's 70 percent number without including them.

If you focus strictly on "restaurants and hotels" (or, more precisely, the leisure and hospitality sector), health care, retail, and temporary employment services, your conclusion would be that these sectors accounted for about 50 percent of total job growth/change over the past six months, a share that may still strike you as pretty significant. But is it really? A little historical context might help:

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It is true that this expansion, which began in July 2009, has been unusually concentrated in the four sectors identified by Bloomberg and highlighted in the Meyerson piece. However, a closer look reveals that the only one of the four that looks unusual is employment in temporary help services, the share of which in this recovery has been five times the post-1990 level as a whole. (We reach the same conclusion even if we compare where we are today in this recovery—roughly three years out—with that same period following the recoveries from the 1991 and 2001 recessions.)

On the other hand, it is also true that the share of temp services in total jobs gains has been much lower over the past six months than it was earlier in this recovery. I don't know if that share will eventually fall to the (remarkably stable) level that characterized the (almost) two decades before the past recession. But even if that share remains near 12 percent, as opposed the more historical 6 percent level, I think the story remains the broad-based nature of the relatively tepid growth (in incomes and jobs) that has characterized this recovery.

By Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed