IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedcwp/1438.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Assessing the Change in Labor Market Conditions

Author

Abstract

This paper describes a dynamic factor model of 19 U.S. labor market indicators, covering the broad categories of unemployment and underemployment, employment, workweeks, wages, vacancies, hiring, layoffs, quits, and surveys of consumers? and businesses? perceptions. The resulting labor market conditions index (LMCI) is a useful tool for gauging the change in labor market conditions. In addition, the model provides a way to organize discussions of the signal value of different labor market indicators in situations when they might be sending diverse signals. The model takes the greatest signal from private payroll employment and the unemployment rate. Other infl uential indicators include the insured unemployment rate, consumers? perceptions of job availability, and help-wanted advertising. Through the lens of the LMCI, labor market conditions have improved at a moderate pace over the past several years, albeit with some notable variation along the way. In addition, from the perspective of the model, the unemployment rate declined a bit faster over the past two years than was consistent with the other indicators.

Suggested Citation

  • Hess T. Chung & Bruce Fallick & Christopher J. Nekarda & David Ratner, 2015. "Assessing the Change in Labor Market Conditions," Working Papers (Old Series) 1438, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedcwp:1438
    DOI: 10.26509/frbc-wp-201438
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-wp-201438
    File Function: Persistent link
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.clevelandfed.org/-/media/project/clevelandfedtenant/clevelandfedsite/publications/working-papers/2014/wp-1438-assessing-the-changes-in-labor-market-conditions-pdf.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.26509/frbc-wp-201438?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Giannone, Domenico & Reichlin, Lucrezia & Small, David, 2008. "Nowcasting: The real-time informational content of macroeconomic data," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 55(4), pages 665-676, May.
    2. Michelle L. Barnes & Ryan Chahrour & Giovanni P. Olivei & Gaoyan Tang, 2007. "A principal components approach to estimating labor market pressure and its implications for inflation," Public Policy Brief, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
    3. Michael Elsby & Bart Hobijn & Ayşegül Şahin, 2013. "On the Importance of the Participation Margin for Market Fluctuations," Working Paper Series 2013-05, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
    4. Davis, Steven J. & Faberman, R. Jason & Haltiwanger, John, 2012. "Labor market flows in the cross section and over time," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 59(1), pages 1-18.
    5. Stephanie Aaronson & Tomaz Cajner & Bruce Fallick & Felix Galbis-Reig & Christopher Smith & William Wascher, 2014. "Labor Force Participation: Recent Developments and Future Prospects," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 45(2 (Fall)), pages 197-275.
    6. Anne E. Polivka & Stephen M. Miller, 1998. "The CPS after the Redesign: Refocusing the Economic Lens," NBER Chapters, in: Labor Statistics Measurement Issues, pages 249-289, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Thomas J. Sargent & Christopher A. Sims, 1977. "Business cycle modeling without pretending to have too much a priori economic theory," Working Papers 55, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
    8. Barnichon, Regis, 2010. "Building a composite Help-Wanted Index," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 109(3), pages 175-178, December.
    9. Craig S. Hakkio & Jonathan L. Willis, 2013. "Assessing labor market conditions: the level of activity and the speed of improvement," Macro Bulletin, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, issue july18, pages 1-2, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Champagne, Julien & Kurmann, André & Stewart, Jay, 2017. "Reconciling the divergence in aggregate U.S. wage series," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(C), pages 27-41.
    2. Stephanie Aaronson & Tomaz Cajner & Bruce Fallick & Felix Galbis-Reig & Christopher Smith & William Wascher, 2014. "Labor Force Participation: Recent Developments and Future Prospects," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 45(2 (Fall)), pages 197-275.
    3. Albuquerque, Bruno & Baumann, Ursel, 2017. "Will US inflation awake from the dead? The role of slack and non-linearities in the Phillips curve," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 39(2), pages 247-271.
    4. L. Ferrara. & G. Sestieri., 2014. "US labour market and monetary policy: current debates and challenges," Quarterly selection of articles - Bulletin de la Banque de France, Banque de France, issue 36, pages 111-129, winter.
    5. Troy Gilchrist & Bart Hobijn, 2021. "The Divergent Signals about Labor Market Slack," FRBSF Economic Letter, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, vol. 2021(15), pages 01-06, June.
    6. Jed Armstrong & Günes Kamber & Özer Karagedikli, 2016. "Developing a labour utilisation composite index for New Zealand," Reserve Bank of New Zealand Analytical Notes series AN2016/04, Reserve Bank of New Zealand.
    7. Salamaliki, Paraskevi, 2019. "Assessing labor market conditions in Greece: a note," MPRA Paper 97559, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    8. Simona Malovaná & Martin Hodula & Jan Frait, 2021. "What Does Really Drive Consumer Confidence?," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 155(3), pages 885-913, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Stock, J.H. & Watson, M.W., 2016. "Dynamic Factor Models, Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregressions, and Structural Vector Autoregressions in Macroeconomics," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 415-525, Elsevier.
    2. Josh Beverly & Shamar L. Stewart & Clinton L. Neill, 2023. "The dynamics of labor force participation: Is all quiet on the Appalachian front?," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 65(6), pages 2867-2898, December.
    3. Stephanie Aaronson & Tomaz Cajner & Bruce Fallick & Felix Galbis-Reig & Christopher Smith & William Wascher, 2014. "Labor Force Participation: Recent Developments and Future Prospects," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 45(2 (Fall)), pages 197-275.
    4. Stephanie R. Aaronson & Mary C. Daly & William L. Wascher & David W. Wilcox, 2019. "Okun Revisited: Who Benefits Most from a Strong Economy?," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 50(1 (Spring), pages 333-404.
    5. Henry R. Hyatt & James R. Spletzer, 2016. "The Shifting Job Tenure Distribution†," Working Papers 16-12r, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.
    6. Bart Hobijn & Ayşegül Şahin, 2021. "Maximum Employment and the Participation Cycle," NBER Working Papers 29222, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Hyatt, Henry R. & Spletzer, James R., 2016. "The shifting job tenure distribution," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 363-377.
    8. Park, Seonyoung, 2018. "A structural explanation of recent changes in life-cycle labor supply and fertility behavior of married women in the United States," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 129-168.
    9. Carlos Arteta & M. Ayhan Kose & Franziska Ohnsorge & Marc Stocke, 2015. "The Coming U.S. Interest Rate Tightening Cycle: Smooth Sailing or Stormy Waters?," Koç University-TUSIAD Economic Research Forum Working Papers 1522, Koc University-TUSIAD Economic Research Forum.
    10. Catherine Doz & Domenico Giannone & Lucrezia Reichlin, 2012. "A Quasi–Maximum Likelihood Approach for Large, Approximate Dynamic Factor Models," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 94(4), pages 1014-1024, November.
    11. Danny Yagan, 2019. "Employment Hysteresis from the Great Recession," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 127(5), pages 2505-2558.
    12. Dale Jorgenson & Mun Ho & Jon Samuels, 2019. "Educational Intensity and the Sources of, and Prospects for, U.S. Economic Growth," International Productivity Monitor, Centre for the Study of Living Standards, vol. 36, pages 161-186, Spring.
    13. Aruoba, S. BoraÄŸan & Diebold, Francis X. & Scotti, Chiara, 2009. "Real-Time Measurement of Business Conditions," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 27(4), pages 417-427.
    14. Michael W. L. Elsby & Bart Hobijn & Aysegul Sahin, 2010. "The Labor Market in the Great Recession," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 41(1 (Spring), pages 1-69.
    15. Brandyn Bok & Daniele Caratelli & Domenico Giannone & Argia M. Sbordone & Andrea Tambalotti, 2018. "Macroeconomic Nowcasting and Forecasting with Big Data," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 10(1), pages 615-643, August.
    16. Ma, Tao & Zhou, Zhou & Antoniou, Constantinos, 2018. "Dynamic factor model for network traffic state forecast," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 118(C), pages 281-317.
    17. Christopher L. Foote & Richard W. Ryan, 2015. "Labor-Market Polarization over the Business Cycle," NBER Macroeconomics Annual, University of Chicago Press, vol. 29(1), pages 371-413.
    18. Christian vom Lehn & Eric Fisher & Aspen Gorry, 2018. "Male Labor Supply and Generational Fiscal Policy," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 28, pages 121-149, April.
    19. Jonas Krampe & Luca Margaritella, 2021. "Factor Models with Sparse VAR Idiosyncratic Components," Papers 2112.07149, arXiv.org, revised May 2022.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    LMCI; U.S. labor market; dynamic factor models; unemployment rates; employment;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
    • E66 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - General Outlook and Conditions
    • J20 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - General
    • J6 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedcwp:1438. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: 4D Library (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbclus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.