Future Skill Shortages in the U.S. Economy?

David Neumark, Hans P. Johnson and Marisol Cuellar Mejia

No 17213, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The impending retirement of the baby boom cohort represents the first time in the history of the United States that such a large and well-educated group of workers will exit the labor force. This could imply skill shortages in the U.S. economy. We develop near-term labor force projections of the educational demands on the workforce and the supply of workers by education to assess the potential for skill imbalances to emerge. Based on our formal projections, we see little likelihood of skill shortages emerging by the end of this decade. More tentatively, though, skill shortages are more likely as all of the baby boomers retire in later years, and skill shortages are more likely in the near-term in states with large and growing immigrant populations.

JEL-codes: J11 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-lma
Note: AG LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as Neumark, David & Johnson, Hans & Mejia, Marisol Cuellar, 2013. "Future skill shortages in the U.S. economy?," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 32(C), pages 151-167.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17213.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Future skill shortages in the U.S. economy? (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:17213

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17213

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().