The Lost Generation? Labor Market Outcomes for Post Great Recession Entrants

Jesse Rothstein

No 27516, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: I study cohort patterns in the labor market outcomes of recent college graduates, examining changes surrounding the Great Recession. Recession entrants have lower wages and employment than those of earlier cohorts; more recent cohorts’ employment is even lower, but the newest entrants’ wages have risen. I relate these changes to "scarring" effects of initial conditions. I demonstrate that adverse early conditions permanently reduce new entrants’ employment probabilities. I also replicate earlier results of medium-term scarring effects on wages that fade out by the early 30s. But scarring cannot account for the employment collapse for recent cohorts. There was a dramatic negative structural break in college graduates’ employment rates, beginning around the 2005 entry cohort, that shows no sign of abating.

JEL-codes: E24 J2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma and nep-mac
Note: EFG LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Published as Jesse Rothstein, 2023. "The Lost Generation? Labor Market Outcomes for Post-Great Recession Entrants," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 58(5), pages 1452-1479.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27516.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:nbr:nberwo:27516

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27516

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 ().