Abraham, Kearney map labor changes
In a post for the Washington Post Wonkblog, Andrew Ven Dam reports on a new NBER Working Paper from Faculty Associates Katharine Abraham and Melissa Kearney, summing it up with the headline "Millions of jobs are still missing. Don't blame immigrants or food stamps."
The paper "first documents trends in employment rates and then reviews what is known about the various factors that have been proposed to explain the decline in the overall employment-to-population ratio between 1999 and 2016. Population aging has had a notable effect on the overall employment rate over this period, but within-age-group declines in employment among young and prime age adults have been at least as important. A review of the evidence leads the researchers to conclude that labor demand factors, in particular trade and the penetration of robots into the labor market, are the most important drivers of observed within-group declines in employment."
See remarks from Richard V. Reeves and Eleanor Krause at Brookings