Why Is the Job-Finding Rate Still Low?

Christina Patterson, Aysegul Sahin and Giorgio Topa

No 20140219, Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: Fluctuations in unemployment are mostly driven by fluctuations in the job-finding prospects of unemployed workers?except at the onset of recessions, according to various research papers (see, for example, Shimer [2005, 2012] and Elsby, Hobijn, and Sahin [2010]). With job losses back to their pre-recession levels, the job-finding rate is arguably one of the most important indicators to watch. This rate?defined as the fraction of unemployed workers in a given month who find jobs in the consecutive month?provides a good measure of how easy it is to find jobs in the economy. The chart below presents the job-finding rate starting from 1990. Clearly, the job-finding rate is still substantially below its pre-recession levels, suggesting that it is still difficult for the unemployed to find work. In this post, we explore the underlying reasons behind the low job-finding rate.

Keywords: job-finding rates; labor markets; matching function; match efficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-02-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2014 ... -rate-still-low.html (text/html)

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:fip:fednls:86926

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().