Unemployment

• Definitions

• Text problems on Unemployment

• Employment Situtation Report -- latest numbers. See especially
  • Summary Table A (Houehold Survey Data)
  • Summary Table B (Establishment Survey Data)
  • Table A-15 (Alternative Measures of Labor Underutilization).

• Job reports can be confusing, especially January job reports -- Daniel Indiviglio, the Atlantic's business editor, puzzled over the report for Jan. 2010, and was so puzzled by the Jan. 2011 report he devoted 3 columns to it:
  • Unemployment Rate Falls to 9.7 %, But 20,000 Jobs Were Lost ? by Daniel Individglio, The Atlantic , Feb. 5, 2010.
  • What does January's Job Report Mean for Sentiment? The Atlantic , Feb. 4, 2010 10:06 AM ET
  • What's Causing the Strange Jobs Data Discrepancies? The Atlantic , Feb. 4, 2010, 3:21 PM ET
  • Government: No One Stopped Looking for Jobs in January The Atlantic , Feb. 4, 2010, 4:06 PM ET

• Measures of Unemployment
  • Current Population Survey
  • Current Employment Situation News Release
  • Alternative Measures of Labor Underutilization Link to the latest data.

  • Local Area Unemployment Statistics Go directly to the data.
  • Mass Layoff Statistics
  • International Labor Comparisons

• The Statistics in Depth
  • The Unemployment Rate and Beyond: Alternative Measures of Labor Underutilization Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Issues in Labor Statistics , Summary 08-06, June, 2008.
  • Measures of Labor Underutilization from the Current Population Survey by Steven E.Haugen, BLS, Working Paper 424, March 2009. A longer but very interesting discussion of the "unemployment rate" in historical perspective.
  • Measurement of Unemployment by Katherine Bradbury, Public Policy Brief No. 06-2 from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Draft of article published in the Palgrave Dictionary of Economics . Good on international measures and how they differ.

  • Sizing Up the 2007-2009 Recession Issues in Labor Statistics, Dec. 2010. How the unemployment rate and employment-population ratio compare to previous recessions.

  • Ranks of Unemployed for a Year or more up sharply Issues in Labor Statistics, Oct. 2010.

• Causes of Unemployment
  • Nobel Prize in Economics, 2010 . Peter Diamond, Dale Mortensen, and Christopher Pissarides, for their work on job search and unemployment.
    • Information for the Public -- a brief summary of their work.
    • Markets with Search Frictions a more detailed overview of their work.

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