Reader rtd states “it is virtually guaranteed that after a nation’s business cycle trough, that same nation’s employment growth will display an upward trend.” I thought this an interesting enough assertion that it merited additional investigation.
Category Archives: employment
Quasi-Stylized Facts about Employment after Troughs
Reader rtd writes: “…it is virtually guaranteed that after a nation’s business cycle trough, that same nation’s employment growth will display an upward trend”, but when asked about the euro area, argues “The Eurozone is a conglomerate of nations with varying fiscal policies, ideologies, cultures, and the list goes on and on. Please don’t compare apples with hand grenades.”
Private Employment under Obama and Bush
Reader Move On admonishes me to … move on. So here is job creation in this Administration, in comparative perspective.
Wisconsin: Only 93,200 Net New Jobs Needed in January 2015 to Hit Governor Walker’s 250,000 Jobs Target
According to WI DWD statistics released today.
The December Employment Release
The JEC Chair Brady (R) writes: “While the unemployment rate has fallen it doesn’t tell the true story about stagnant paychecks and Americans struggling to find full-time work.” He then calls for passage of Keystone-XL as part of the remedy.
Minimum Wage Increases in the Wake of WW II
Some people have fixated upon the near doubling of the minimum wage after WW II (one person misidentifies the date as 1948, but it’s actually 1950) as a cause of disemployment in certain groups. This may have happened; however, the increase in the minimum wage from $0.40 to $0.75 was not associated with a decrease in general employment, nor of youth unemployment.
New estimates of the effects of the minimum wage
A large literature has examined the effects on employment of raising the minimum wage, with different researchers arriving at conflicting conclusions. The core reason that economists can’t answer questions like this better is that we usually can’t run controlled experiments. There is always some reason that the legislators chose to raise the minimum wage, often related to prevailing economic conditions. We can never be sure if changes in employment that followed the legislation were the result of those motivating conditions or the result of the legislation itself. For example, if Congress only raises the minimum wage when the economy is on the rebound and all wages are about to rise anyway, we’d usually observe a rise in employment following a hike in the minimum wage that is not caused by the legislation itself. UCSD Ph.D. candidate Michael Wither and his adviser Professor Jeffrey Clemens have some interesting new research that sheds some more light on this question.
How Come I Don’t Still Hear about the “Worst Recovery Ever”?
Just wondering — where is Ed Lazear when you need him?
Accelerated Employment Growth, Little Inflationary Pressure
Nonfarm payroll employment clocks in substantially above consensus (321,000 vs Bloomberg: mean 230,000, range 140,000 to 275,000), solidifying trend growth. Previous months’ estimates revised upward. Wages continue to rise, but labor costs in productivity adjusted terms are stable.
Lunatic Fringe Alert: Government Statistics Edition
Longtime reader Ricardo (aka Dick/DickF/RicardoZ) writes:
…Our government is doing a serious disservice by falsifying the employment condition in our country. Policy changes that could actually help are being delayed with false information.