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

John Komlos

Challenge, 2021, vol. 64, issue 1, 51-74

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%.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/05775132.2020.1863547 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/MCHA20

DOI: 10.1080/05775132.2020.1863547

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Challenge from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().