Mike Nigro answered quickly pointing to a New York Fed study by Samuel Kapon and Joseph Tracy summarized here and producing the next graph.
Rather than just look at the number of 25-54 year olds They divide people "into 280 different cohorts defined by each individual’s decade of birth, sex, race/ethnicity, and educational attainment," and then estimate age-employment profiles for each bin using a large pre-recession dataset.
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| Source: Samuel Kapon and Joseph Tracy |
But, more sophisticated also means more assumptions one can quibble with.
They estimated profiles using data through 2013, i.e. including the recession. They used a "full set of year effects" so that a shift downwards in everyone's employment doesn't affect the profiles. But the recession didn't hit everyone equally. If the recession hits old people more than young, even with year effects, we will see a recession-induced fall in the profile.
More deeply, "there is no overall intercept for our demographically adjusted E/P ratio—only variations over time. To determine an intercept, we adopt the normalization that over the thirty-one years in our data sample any business-cycle deviations between the actual and the adjusted E/P ratios will average to zero."
In English, looking back at the middle graph, you can slide the blue line up or down to anywhere you want it. Samuel and Joseph put the blue line in the middle of the red lines. But they could just as easily have had the blue line clip the tops of the red lines, and call it "potential" employment in the Keynesian tradition. Or higher still, they could have assumed that the employment of highly educated white men is "normal" and scored everything else as a shortfall. Torsten's graph uses a different scale (right) for the blue line as the red line (left). So there as well, the relative position of blue and red lines is totally arbitrary.
To be clear, all the authors are perfectly clear about this limitation. But if you look at the middle graph and conclude that we're close to some sort of "normal," you're jumping to a big conclusion.
Finally, neither graph by itself says everything is fine in the labor market. Is it "normal" that 40% of 50 year old white men with less than high school educations do not work at all? Is it written in human biology that there is a cliff in employment at 62 and 65? Or do both of these facts reveal people responding to economic incentives, many set up by government programs (in the latter case, medicare and social security rules) that may be less than ideal? Even if the employment-population ratio were to follow the blue line exactly, that does not mean all is well. Our issue is no longer "recession" but "perpetually low growth."
So far, though, Samuel and Joseph's graph produces about the same result as Torsten's. Actually, it's stronger. Torsten felt that 54-65 year olds were retiring in unusually high numbers on stock market wealth -- something they didn't do in 1999 and 2006 -- while Samuel and Joseph say the decline is all demographics and the usual age earning profile.
"Just a gosh-dern minute here. If you graph the E/P ratio of just the 25-54 year olds, you get basically the same curve."
The blue line is the celebrated overall employment-population ratio. The red line is the employment-population ratio of 25-54 year olds. Good point Oliver! Joseph and Samuel could just as easily produce the time-series of employment in their 280 buckets. (Presuming they haven't done that somewhere else.)
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| Source: New York Times |
Still, none of these graphs really tell us how much of the overall decline in employment-population ratio is due to these "within-demographic" changes vs. the change in demographics and the "usual" differences in employment across demographics. It looks like there is a bit of both.
Into the fray, Jim Bullard, St. Louis Fed President, has a nice speech, two weeks ago, a refined version of which will appear next week in the St. Louis Fed's economic review. The Fed too is puzzled -- unemployment is down, but the employment-population ratio has not recovered. Still weak "demand?" Now "supply" that the Fed can't do anything about?
Jim reviews a large scholarly literature. What I got out of this is, so far nobody has really clear answers. Well, knowing there isn't a clear answer out there is knowledge.
Echoing my thoughts above Jim says
Much of the literature I have reviewed uses the same basic idea: Certain demographic groups have a certain propensity to participate in market work, and one of the main things we need to do as economists is project the number of people in each of these groups in order to determine a reasonable estimate of the expected (or “normal” or “trend”) labor force participation rate in the U.S. economy. Much of the literature concludes that demographics have contributed substantially to the observed decline in U.S. labor force participation since 2000.
Still, the literature as a whole is a bit hollow. Simply saying that people in certain demographic groups tend to make the participation decision one way or another does not do enough to analyze the incentives of household labor supply decisions. The more we know about the details of the household labor supply choices, including choices to participate in market work, the better we can predict the impact of policy on labor force participation. Furthermore, we would like these decisions to be part of the macroeconomic model, as Erceg and Levin suggest.Here Jim speculates about the recent, and very worthwhile literature on "household production" that models the decision to work or not. He does not speculate on how much those decisions are distorted by policy. 40% of 40 year old white men are not perpetually choosing to be out of work, facing the full cost of that decision, to be artists, take the kids to soccer practice or even to repaint the living room walls.
The bottom line, I think, is simple. We want to know, is the employment-population ratio low because of generic lack of "demand," "discouraged workers" who have simply given up looking? Is it due to lack of "supply," either due to preferences and demography or due to labor market distortions? Is it due to the "normal" change in desire to work as people get older? What are the economic reasons that minority and less educated people work less than high education white males? It's as offensive to economics as to the people involved to write these employment-population differences as innate features of human beings. Is the decline due to the interaction of demographics with the disincentives provided by existing government programs? Is it due to the disincentives of new government programs -- long-lasting unemployment insurance, expanded food stamps, looming ACA, etc. etc? Is it due to the interaction of a recession with government programs -- people normally work, but once they get hit by a recession, they get stuck in the non-work state? How much is due to resistance, natural and artificial, to moving? How much is the skills mismatch? Job opportunities change from construction in Florida to computer programming in California, and people don't follow. Simple aggregate labor demand and supply can't address that.
Sadly, no simple graph answers those questions.
Update:
From John Taylor's blog, Chris Erceg and Andrew Levin's plot of the employment-population ratio and two projections of demographic effects, made ahead of time.
Yes, many trends and patterns.
ReplyDeleteIt becomes difficult to point to any one trend or pattern, with great confidence, as the lead trend or pattern. However, on normal occasion and in the main, one can point out with great confidence that: Mom’s basement is only so big.
Great post and great questions at the end. A small quibble with one of your assertions. You state that 40% of 40-year-old white males with a high school education don't work. The Kapon/Tracy graph indicates that over 80% of 40-year-old high school educated males work. You don't hit the 60% mark until after age 60. 40-year-old men with less than a high school education have a 70% employment rate.
ReplyDeleteFixed, thanks for pointing it out.
Delete"In English, looking back at the middle graph, you can slide the blue line up or down to anywhere you want it. Samuel and Joseph put the blue line in the middle of the red lines. But they could just as easily have had the blue line clip the tops of the red lines, and call it 'potential' employment in the Keynesian tradition."
ReplyDeleteOr Friedman's plucking model ...
http://informationtransfereconomics.blogspot.com/2013/12/this-plucking-model.html
Which can be thought of in terms of the efficiency with which the market mechanism transfers information:
http://informationtransfereconomics.blogspot.com/2014/03/modeling-macroeconomic-fluctuations.html
John,
ReplyDeleteDoesn't your argument imply that we don't know whether the dramatic drop in employment from 2008 to 2009 was demand or supply?
John,
ReplyDeleteFor a while I've been trying (without much success) to get traction for the idea that the poor jobs situation is due to one flaw in the "Chicago School" free-market view of the economy: that there is no such thing as a trade deficit.
While this is true in the strictest sense, what is seems (to me at least) to overlook is that when the dollars spent on purchasing foreign goods return to us they (unfortunately) don't necessarily have to do so in a way that creates jobs. That is, those dollars may instead be used to purchase assets that we inherited from previous generations (or even nature itself, such as a forest).
For instance, one could argue that all those VCRs we got from Japan in the 80's were paid for via selling them Rockefeller Center, and all of the DVD players we got from China in more recent years were paid for via selling them the AMC movie chain.
And of course there are a zillion more examples like this, since so much of what we buy, from clothes to medicine to food to cars, is foreign-made. (And even some services, such as customer support call centers, credit card processing, etc., are outsourced.)
So, in essence, we sell control of our assets in exchange for the things we need, rather than make them ourselves. So all is left is low-paying local service jobs (flipping burgers, etc.) or government jobs (where the government forces taxpayers to pay the government employee a good wage and benefits, at the expense of the taxpayers).
Of course, this situation can't last forever, but due to the relatively short lifespan of humans those who caused the problem aren't the ones to suffer. (In fact, this is already the case with retired generations and the departed having better lives than young working people.)
To me this seems obvious, and far more fundamental than most of what professional economists spend their time on. And yet I've not been able to get anyone to pay attention to it. Tell you what: You do the math and prove it formally, and we'll split the Nobel prize. Deal?
My complaint about both libs and cons in this debate is that people and society are assumed not to be mutable.
ReplyDeleteBut, in strong jobs markets, many people could decide not to retire, or work as consultants, part-time etc.
We have better health today, and more jobs are not physically demanding.
Should we accept declining employment-to-popuation ratios?
A couter-argument that I just thought of, it that rising living standards are finally giving to us a long ago promise: shorter working weeks or lives.
If you are old enough you remember Life magazine's 1960s cover story about the pending four-day work week, and huge growth in leisure industries...and that assumed a single working parent...
The discussion at macro level sounds a bit "old-fashioned" if compared with what labour economists, at micro level, can come up with nowadays. In this very special case, I think the skill-mismatch it's the most important driver of labour force participation, along with industry shift in employment (for instance, unskilled construction workers cannot be "transformed" in engineers at ANY cost). I would like to suggest this OECD brand-new database on skills and competencies of the adult workforce. http://www.oecd.org/site/piaac/
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, with just one Xsection, one cannot identify shifts in skills, but at least it helps in disentangling personal skills and competencies, and the ones used at the workplace.
Skill-mismatch measures can then be introduced, by looking at the wedge between the skills used and those possessed. I think this is the only way to address the specific issue of a structural break in the participation rate, of course taking into account all the policy variables driving the decisions to participate in the labour-market. Thanks for the excellent post
I've another version, I used pre-2007 employment-population ratios by age bracket combined with demographic projections by age bracket to calculate an expected employment level. What Here's one more version:
ReplyDeleteI generate is an expected number of employed – empl/pop was relatively stable for the years leading up to 2007. I then compare that with actual employment levels....I guess I should update over the weekend when the new CPS / CES data are released!
http://autosandeconomics.blogspot.jp/2013/11/data-update-november-2013.html