Measuring Labor-Force Participation and the Incidence and Duration of Unemployment

Hie Joo Ahn and James Hamilton

No 27394, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The underlying data from which the U.S. unemployment rate, labor-force participation rate, and duration of unemployment are calculated contain numerous internal contradictions. This paper catalogs these inconsistencies and proposes a unified reconciliation. We find that the usual statistics understate the unemployment rate and the labor-force participation rate by about two percentage points on average and that the bias in the latter has increased over time. The BLS estimate of the average duration of unemployment substantially overstates the true duration of uninterrupted spells of unemployment and misrepresents what happened to average durations during the Great Recession and its recovery.

JEL-codes: E24 E32 J01 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab, nep-mac and nep-ore
Note: EFG LS ME
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Published as Hie Joo Ahn & James D. Hamilton, 2021. "Measuring labor-force participation and the incidence and duration of unemployment," Review of Economic Dynamics, .

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27394.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Measuring Labor-Force Participation and the Incidence and Duration of Unemployment (2022)
Working Paper: Measuring Labor-Force Participation and the Incidence and Duration of Unemployment (2019)
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:27394

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27394

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 ().