The latest report from the Census Bureau shows that the child poverty rate, measured using the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), spiked from 5.2% in 2021 to 12.4% in 2022. The Official Poverty rate for children (under the age of 18) saw no significant change across the two years and held steady at 15%. A key reason that SPM rates have been ...

Rapid advances in technology have made our lives remarkably convenient. Today, sitting in our homes, we can order anything from groceries to electronics to books to cars. We can request cleaning services, plan travel, speak with medical professionals about our health care a and "visit" the Egyptian pyramids and other wonders around the world ...

What are the short and long-term impacts of paid parental leave on workforce attachment for working mothers? It turns out that there is still much to learn. While several earlier studies have documented that California’s 2004 Paid Family and Medical Leave (PFML) policy increased work hours and incomes for women following the birth of a child, ...

Despite the steady positive news in the monthly jobs report, a recent talking point, oft-repeated, is that too many people are holding two or three jobs in order to make ends meet. Rep. Tim Ryan brought this up during the recent Democratic debate arguing that “the economic system…now force(s) us to have two or three jobs just to get by.” In ...

When the unemployment rate dropped to below 5 percent in 2017, there was widespread belief that the economy was close to, if not at, full employment. Full employment means that almost everyone who is willing and able to work is in the labor force and able to find a job. Competition for workers between firms would then lead to higher wages ...

The puzzle of the Great Recession is not the slow wage growth during the recovery, but rather the high nominal and real wages during the recession. Generally, as unemployment rises and economic growth slows, wages respond with a downward correction. That didn’t happen this time around.
A 2012 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San ...

Today's jobs report was underwhelming along many dimensions. Not only did total payroll gains fall markedly short of expectations at 126,000, but payroll gains for January and February were also revised downwards by 69,000 jobs in total. Wage gains were modest and there was little, if any, improvement in labor force participation. This ...

With the January jobs report out, now is a good time to study how the labor market has done on various indicators over the course of the calendar year.
Let's start with the headline unemployment rate. The unemployment rate for all workers has come down by almost a full percentage point, dropping from 6.6 percent to 5.7 percent between January ...