The Actual U.S. Unemployment Rate Was 24.4% in May 2020

John Komlos

No 8383, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: The official U.S. unemployment rate is an inadequate measure of actual labor market conditions. This poses a major challenge for researchers and confuses both the public and policy makers. 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 worked relative to full-time workers prior to the pandemic. In addition, in contrast to the BLS, we consider those workers who are wanting to work but have not searched for work within the prior month as being unemployed. We find that the actual unemployment rate in May 2020 was 24.4% or 183% of the headline rate of 13.3%.

Keywords: covid-19; pandemic; unemployment rate; labor market slack; discouraged workers; involuntary part-time workers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B40 C82 J40 J49 J69 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp8383.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ces:ceswps:_8383

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().