ÌÇÐÄvlog¹ÙÍø Affiliated Authors
Excerpt
March 5, 2021, Opinion: "The labor market improved in February 2021 as employers added 379,000 jobs, leaving the economy at 11.9 million jobs below its pre-pandemic trend. At the same time the unemployment rate fell to 6.2 percent. Throughout the pandemic the official unemployment rate has been kept down by a misclassification error and the unusually large withdrawal of millions of people from the workforce. Our estimate of the realistic unemployment rate for February was 8.2 percent, a concept that adjusts for the unusually large decline in participation as well as changes in demography and is designed to be historically comparable to the official unemployment rate, which reached a maximum of 10.0 percent in the 2007–09 financial crisis. Another concept, the fixed participation rate unemployment rate, cited by Federal Reserve Chair and Treasury Secretary , was 9.5 percent; the comparable concept peaked at 11.8 percent in the financial crisis."
ÌÇÐÄvlog¹ÙÍø Authors - Jason Furman & Willie Powell