IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/mes/challe/v64y2021i1p51-74.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Actual U.S. Unemployment Rate in 2019 Was Twice the Official Rate, and the Phillips Curve

Author

Listed:
  • John Komlos

Abstract

The official U.S. unemployment rate is an inadequate measure of labor market conditions. This poses a major challenge for basic research and for successful economic policy. In this piece, the author proposes a new definition of unemployment is proposed. It considers those part-time workers who would like to work full time as 62.7% employed and 37.3% unemployed inasmuch as this is the proportion of time they work relative to full-time workers. New monthly estimates of the unemployment rate are calculated for the period 1994–2019 and find that their average during this 25-year period was 10.7% or 5.0 percentage points above the official rate of 5.7%.

Suggested Citation

  • John Komlos, 2021. "The Actual U.S. Unemployment Rate in 2019 Was Twice the Official Rate, and the Phillips Curve," Challenge, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 64(1), pages 51-74, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:mes:challe:v:64:y:2021:i:1:p:51-74
    DOI: 10.1080/05775132.2020.1863547
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/05775132.2020.1863547
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/05775132.2020.1863547?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Tsoulfidis, Lefteris & Tsaliki, Persefoni, 2021. "The Long Recession and Economic Consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic," MPRA Paper 107737, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Tsoulfidis, Lefteris & Tsaliki, Persefoni, 2021. "The Long Recession and the Economic Consequences of the Pandemic," MPRA Paper 107738, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Luminița Chivu & George Georgescu, 2023. "The foundation of real-world economics: what every student needs to know," Economic Thought journal, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences - Economic Research Institute, issue 3, pages 343-350.
    4. Fontanari, Claudia & Palumbo, Antonella & Salvatori, Chiara, 2022. "The updated Okun method for estimation of potential output with alternative measures of labor underutilization," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 60(C), pages 158-178.
    5. Lambert, Thomas, 2022. "The Great Resignation, Unemployment, and Underemployment in the US: A Study of Labor Market Segmentation," MPRA Paper 114067, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    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:mes:challe:v:64:y:2021:i:1:p:51-74. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/MCHA20 .

    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.