Regarding the slowdown in employment growth in February, reader Neil asks:
To what extent could the weakness in February be a payback for the outsized growth in December and January. The three month average for nonfarm growth in Wisconsin looks solid. Also, do you have any thoughts on the average hourly earnings data? Looks like Wisconsin is seeing strong growth over the last year.
Dark warnings were voiced in the wake of the passage of the minimum wage ordinance. “Seattle’s Minimum-Wage Hike Is Sure to End in Disaster”. “Seattle sees fallout from $15 minimum wage” In an early — and widely debunked — assessment, Mark J. Perry writes “New evidence suggests that Seattle’s ‘radical experiment’ might be a model for the rest of the nation not to follow”.
Quick links to a few items I found interesting.
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From the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, October 2014, in re: the $7.25/hour minimum wage.
The Department [of Workforce Development] has determined there is no reasonable cause to believe the wages paid to the complainants are not a living wage.
New claims for unemployment insurance this week came in at the lowest level in over 40 years. How much slack can there be left in the labor market?
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I spent the last two weeks in Boston at the NBER Summer Institute where I learned about a lot of interesting new economic research. Here I describe a new paper by Jae Song, David Price, Fatih Guvenen, Nicholas Bloom, and Till von Wachter on the role of firm-specific factors in rising income inequality.
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The economy has steadily been moving closer to the Fed’s long-run objectives. But we’re still not there yet.
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The March establishment series estimate for nonfarm payroll employment clearly fell far short consensus estimates (release). Here are a couple of quick observations.
In a previous post, Laurent Ferrara, Valérie Mignon, and I examined the nonlinear relationship between employment and output (based on J.Macro (2014)). Using the most recent data, the level of (establishment) employment now matches the output level. Figure 1 shows the actual level, and the predicted level from a nonlinear error correction model that allows short run dynamics to differ between recession and non-recession regimes.
Some people would have you believe the impact of a minimum wage hike on employment is known to be large and negative. A cursory acquaintance with the literature helps in immunizing one (if one believes in vaccines and the like) against falling for such assertions.