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September 13, 2010
(Bloomberg) -- The trajectory of U.S. unemployment through 2012 will depend partly on how many teenagers and working-age men who left the labor force decide to return, and whether older Americans stay in, said researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
"Uncertainty about who will be active in the labor force has important implications for the path of unemployment," according to the paper written by Joyce Kwok, Mary Daly, and Bart Hobijn and released by the bank today. The higher the participation rate, the greater number of jobs needed to keep the unemployment rate down, they said.
The economy has lost 8.4 million jobs during the recession that began in December 2007, the biggest employment slump in the post-World War II era, and unemployment has remained stuck at more than 9 percent for more than a year. The number of new jobs needed to bring joblessness down to 8 percent may range from 208,000 to 294,000 a month, depending on labor-force participation, the authors wrote.
"Although the labor market has slowly begun to recover, unemployment remains stubbornly high," they said. "The pace at which unemployment comes down over the next two years depends in part on the cyclical recovery of labor force participation and the extent to which that offsets or adds to ongoing structural changes in labor force behavior."
--Editors: Brendan Murray, James Tyson
To contact the reporter on this story: Vivien Lou Chen in San Francisco at vchen1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Christopher Wellisz at cwellisz@bloomberg.net
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