Observations and Conjectures on the U.S. Employment Miracle

Alan Krueger and Jorn-Steffen Pischke

Working papers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper has three goals; first to place U.S. job growth in international perspective by exploring cross-country differences in employment and population growth. The second goal is to evaluate the labor markets rigidities hypothesis. Although greater wage flexiblity probably contributes to the U.S.'s comparative success in creating jobs for its population, the slow growth in employment in many European countries appears too uniform across skill groups to result from relative wage inflexibility alone. Furthermore, a great deal of a labor markets adjustment seems to take place at a constant real wage in the U.S. This leads to the third goal: to speculate on other explanations why the U.S. has managed to successfully absorb so many new entrants t o the labor market.

Keywords: LABOUR; MARKET (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J20 J21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 1997
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Working Paper: Observations and Conjectures on the U.S. Employment Miracle (1997)
Working Paper: Observations and Conjectures on the U.S. Employment Miracle (1997)
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