IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/fip/fedfel/00122.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

How Tight Is the U.S. Labor Market?

Author

Abstract

The U.S. unemployment rate fell to a very low level at the end of 2016, raising the question of whether the labor market has become too tight. After applying a new method to adjust for demographic changes in the labor force, the current unemployment rate is still 0.3 to 0.4 percentage point higher than at past labor market peaks. This indicates that the labor market may not be quite as tight as the headline unemployment rate suggests.

Suggested Citation

  • Régis Barnichon & Geert Mesters, 2017. "How Tight Is the U.S. Labor Market?," FRBSF Economic Letter, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedfel:00122
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/files/el2017-07.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Regis Barnichon & Geert Mesters, 2018. "On the Demographic Adjustment of Unemployment," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 100(2), pages 219-231, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lael Brainard, 2017. "Why Opportunity and Inclusion Matter to America’s Economic Strength : a speech at the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Conference, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, May 2," Speech 953, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    2. Janet L. Yellen, 2017. "Inflation, Uncertainty, and Monetary Policy : a speech at the \"Prospects for Growth: Reassessing the Fundamentals\" 59th Annual Meeting of the National Association for Business Economics, C," Speech 971, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Richard K. Crump & Stefano Eusepi & Marc Giannoni & Aysegul Sahin, 2019. "A Unified Approach to Measuring u," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 50(1 (Spring), pages 143-238.
    2. Poncela, Pilar & Ruiz, Esther & Miranda, Karen, 2021. "Factor extraction using Kalman filter and smoothing: This is not just another survey," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 37(4), pages 1399-1425.
    3. Maik H. Wolters, 2018. "How the baby boomers' retirement wave distorts model‐based output gap estimates," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 33(5), pages 680-689, August.
    4. Alonso, Andrés M. & Galeano, Pedro & Peña, Daniel, 2020. "A robust procedure to build dynamic factor models with cluster structure," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 216(1), pages 35-52.
    5. Bruce Fallick & Pawel Krolikowski, 2022. "Excess Persistence in Employment of Disadvantaged Workers," International Journal of Central Banking, International Journal of Central Banking, vol. 18(4), pages 1-52, October.
    6. Blasques, Francisco & Hoogerkamp, Meindert Heres & Koopman, Siem Jan & van de Werve, Ilka, 2021. "Dynamic factor models with clustered loadings: Forecasting education flows using unemployment data," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 37(4), pages 1426-1441.
    7. Andreas Hornstein & Marianna Kudlyak, 2019. "Aggregate Labor Force Participation and Unemployment and Demographic Trends," Working Paper 19-8, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
    8. Francesco D'Amuri & Marta De Philippis & Elisa Guglielminetti & Salvatore Lo Bello, 2021. "Natural unemployment and activity rates: flow-based determinants and implications for price dynamics," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 599, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    9. D’Amuri, Francesco & De Philippis, Marta & Guglielminetti, Elisa & Lo Bello, Salvatore, 2022. "Slack and prices during Covid-19: Accounting for labor market participation," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 75(C).
    10. Yuelin Liu, 2022. "How structural is unemployment in the United States?," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 60(3), pages 1258-1276, July.
    11. Foroni, Claudia & Furlanetto, Francesco, 2022. "Explaining deviations from Okun’s law," Working Paper Series 2699, European Central Bank.
    12. Frohm, Erik, 2020. "Labor shortages and wage growth," Working Paper Series 394, Sveriges Riksbank (Central Bank of Sweden).
    13. Regis Barnichon & Davide Debortoli & Christian Matthes, 2022. "Understanding the Size of the Government Spending Multiplier: It’s in the Sign [Downward Wage Rigidity and Business Cycle Asymmetries]," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 89(1), pages 87-117.
    14. Saeed Zaman, 2021. "A Unified Framework to Estimate Macroeconomic Stars," Working Papers 21-23R, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, revised 15 Aug 2022.
    15. Barnichon, Regis, 2019. "The Ins and Outs of Labor Force Participation," CEPR Discussion Papers 13481, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    16. Stephanie R. Aaronson & Mary C. Daly & William L. Wascher & David W. Wilcox, 2019. "Okun Revisited: Who Benefits Most from a Strong Economy?," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 50(1 (Spring), pages 333-404.
    17. Régis Barnichon & Christian Matthes, 2014. "Gaussian Mixture Approximations of Impulse Responses and the Nonlinear Effects of Monetary Shocks," Working Paper 16-8, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
    18. Brand, Claus & Obstbaum, Meri & Coenen, Günter & Sondermann, David & Lydon, Reamonn & Ajevskis, Viktors & Hammermann, Felix & Angino, Siria & Hernborg, Nils & Basso, Henrique & Hertweck, Matthias & Bi, 2021. "Employment and the conduct of monetary policy in the euro area," Occasional Paper Series 275, European Central Bank.
    19. Alexandre Ounnas, 2020. "Job Polarization and the Labor Market: A Worker Flow Analysis," LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES 2020010, Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES).
    20. Bart Hobijn & Ayşegül Şahin, 2021. "Maximum Employment and the Participation Cycle," NBER Working Papers 29222, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedfel:00122. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Research Library (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbsfus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.