…for about 15 years, initial claims leads the unemployment rate. Here’s the long term history up until the pandemic: Initial claims both increase and decrease several months before the unemployment…

Mark Thoma responds to the meme that the social safety net encourages bad behavior overall: The idea that the unemployment problem is due to lack of effort on behalf of…

…workers leave the state, they free up jobs that homegrown Alabamians are happy to have.” The Cost of Alabama Immigration Law (H.B. 56) Disputed. “Alabama has the lowest unemployment rate…

…structural unemployment is just a policy excuse. It gives policymakers a reason to mitigate the large(r) policy impetus that is needed. Bad idea. Richard Koo argues that structural unemployment is…

Robert Waldmann Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman consider the increase in the number of job vacancies to be bad news — to be a sign that long term unemployment has…

…it continues to fall for one to two years. Even in the last two cycles when the peak unemployment rate lagged the economic trough by months the unemployment rate continue…

…the Fed] is full employment (defined as 4.0 percent unemployment) and price stability.” Let’s be generous. I’ve plotted the Civilian Employment/Population Ratio and the Official Unemployment Rate below. The blue…

…effect of the minimum wage on employment depends on the unemployment rate. The evidence of a small effect is almost all from periods of unemployment far below 10%. I don’t…

…falls apart when you ask why, say, a housing boom — which requires shifting resources into housing — doesn’t produce the same kind of unemployment as a housing bust that…

…Deal did unemployment drop below 15 percent. UNEMPLOYMENT RATE …………OFFICIAL………. ADJUSTED 1933……. 25.2……………. 20.9 1934……. 22.0 ………….. 16.2 1935…… 20.3 …………… 14.2 1936…… 17.0 …………… 10.0 1937…… 14.3………………. 9.2 1938………