Or, I know columnists have deadlines, but really…
In Tuesday’s NYT column, entitled “The Structural Revolution”, David Brooks writes:
Category Archives: employment
More on Governor Romney’s 500,000 job creation target, expressed as a percentage growth rate
Governor Romney has said that 500,000 is the monthly job creation he expects as normal during a recovery [1]. It actually last happened in May 2010 but is otherwise pretty rare. Reader Rick Stryker argues that the 500K should be expressed in percentage terms, accounting for the size of employment. Nonetheless, breaching the equivalent in percentage terms never happened during the eight years of the G.W. Bush administrations.
A Few Observations on the April Employment Situation
According to the BLS, nonfarm employment rose only 115,000, as government payrolls shed 15,000. The household series adjusted to conform to the NFP concept indicates an additional 1.6 million employed relative to the official series. Private sector employment now exceeds levels of 2009M01, while aggregate hours worked exceeds by 1.9% (in log terms). With revisions to the February and March data, average employment growth is 207 thousand in the first four months, as compared to 210 thousand, from the first three months indicated in the March release.
Labor Market Interventions and Learning from Other Countries
As documented in Box 1-2 in the IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook, unemployment in the advanced economies remained persistently high. That brings to the fore how to best deal with adjusting the labor force so as to bring down structural unemployment (although obviously higher aggregate demand would help). In my view, there is the “are there no poorhouses?” approach (cut unemployment benefits, etc. and thus reduce the natural rate of unemployment). The other is to use evidence-based approaches to improve the labor force quality, and improve job matching, thereby decreasing structural unemployment. This alternative is discussed in a recent La Follette Policy Report, by Robert Haveman, Carolyn Heinrich, and Timothy Smeeding, entitled “Policy Responses to the Recent
Poor Performance of the U.S. Labor Market”:
The geography of unemployment
Some quick remarks on the unevenness of the U.S. economic recovery.
Links for 2012-04-14
Quick links to a few items I found interesting.
Current economic conditions
Friday’s jobs report was unquestionably a disappointment. But other recent U.S. economic indicators are more encouraging.
Okun’s Law, the Jobless Recovery, and Unexpectedly Fast Net Job Creation
I have found it somewhat surprising that analysts have worried about how employment growth has recently outpaced GDP, according to Okun’s Law, while others have bemoaned the slow pace of employment growth [0] [1]. Underpinning these discussions is a view that there is instability in the relationship. [2] The first thing to recall is that there are several versions of Okun’s Law. Some are expressed in levels, some in deviations from natural levels (gaps), and some in growth rates. From Figure 1, it does appear that private employment growth has been above expected, after being below expected.
Disentangling the channels of the 2007-2009 recession
Harvard Professor James Stock and Princeton Professor Mark Watson presented a very interesting paper last week at the Spring 2012 Conference for the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. Their paper studied similarities and differences between the 2007-2009 recession and other U.S. business cycles.
The February Employment Release
I’m sure there’s a way to spin the February employment release in a negative way — see for instance JEC Republican vice-chair Brady’s take here — but I think it looks pretty good for a recovery after a combination financial crisis/housing bust/recession. [1]