IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/35327.html

'Nobody Wants to Work Anymore': Lifetime Labor Market Experiences and the Decline of Male LFP in the United States

Author

Listed:
  • Remy Levin
  • Daniela Vidart

Abstract

Male labor force participation has declined steadily for 50 years in the United States. We show that one cause has been changes in men's beliefs about the returns to work, shaped by lifetime experiences of the aggregate male labor market. We find that experience effects on participation persist for men who move across state lines, are stronger for same-race male experiences, and are driven by formative childhood years. We also document effects of experiences on direct measures of labor market expectations. Our findings suggest that experience effects can turn short-run declines in labor demand into long-run declines in labor supply.

Suggested Citation

  • Remy Levin & Daniela Vidart, 2026. "'Nobody Wants to Work Anymore': Lifetime Labor Market Experiences and the Decline of Male LFP in the United States," NBER Working Papers 35327, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35327
    Note: EFG LS
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w35327.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
    • J22 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Time Allocation and Labor Supply

    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:nbr:nberwo:35327. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.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.