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Why Is the U.S. Unemployment Rate so Much Lower?
Open accessAbstract
The U.S. unemployment rate is so much lower because the population is so much older. This paper argues that in the absence of the baby boom, the unemployment rate would neither have increased from 1957 to 1979, nor have fallen in the subsequent two decades. The paper also considers other demographic changes: The most quantitatively significant is the increased educational attainment of the labor force. Since more-educated workers have lower unemployment rates, it might appear that this should have (counterfactually) caused a secular decline in unemployment. However, there are theoretical reasons to believe that an increase in education will not translate into a reduction in unemployment, and independent empirical evidence tends to support this view.
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Citations
Cites
Changes in Relative Wages, 1963-1987: Supply and Demand Factors
Katz, L. F., & Murphy, K. M. (1992) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.2307/2118323 · Cited by 4,793
Cited by
Near-Rational Wage and Price Setting and the Long-Run Phillips Curve
Akerlof, G. A., Dickens, W. T., & Perry, G. L. (2000) · Brookings Papers on Economic Activity · doi:10.1353/eca.2000.0001 · Cited by 527
Foundations of the Goldilocks Economy: Supply Shocks and the Time-Varying NAIRU
Gordon, R. J., & Stock, J. H. (1998) · Brookings Papers on Economic Activity · doi:10.2307/2534696 · Cited by 270
Can age structure forecast inflation trends?
Lindh, T., & Malmberg, B. (2000) · Journal of Economics and Business · doi:10.1016/s0148-6195(99)00026-0 · Cited by 60
Metadata
- Authors
- Shimer, R.
- Venue
- NBER Macroeconomics Annual
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 1998-01
- Volume
- 13
- Pages
- 11-61
- ISSN
- 0889-3365 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-2642
- OpenAlex
- W1513217982
- Cited by
- 174
- References
- 1
- FWCI
- 21.91
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
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- Shimer, R. (1998). Why Is the U.S. Unemployment Rate so Much Lower? NBER Macroeconomics Annual. https://doi.org/10.1086/ma.13.4623732
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
