Recently in labor economics Category

Jason sent me the great interactive graphic below from the folks at the New York Times (April 7, 2009). It shows the amount and countries of origin of foreign-born workers in the United States. Note that the top five sources of immigrant employment in the U.S., in descending order, are Mexico, Philippines, India, China, and El Salvador. We have over 5 million workers from Mexico, but the second-place country--the Philippines--was the source of only about 850,000. U.S. Immigration is truly only about Mexico.

The data come from the most recent survey of the Census Bureau's American Community Survey via the Minnesota Population Center. For a link to other great graphics see, "Perfecting the visual presentation of information."

Dan Hamermesh is currently visiting BYU as an invited seminar speaker. I was showing him my picture of the normalized peak plot of employment in the last 14 recessions, and he told me about another labor fact from this recession that astounded me. Look at the picture below of average duration of unemployment in the U.S. since 1947. The average unemployment duration for everyone who said they were unemployed in August 2009 was 25 weeks (nearly 6 months). Compare that to the average of about 15 weeks between 1976 and 1992. This is the 60-year record in the U.S.

Score another one for the New York Times interactive graphics department. [Thanks to Jason for bringing this to my attention.] They wrote a cool little article highlighting the differences between how the unemployed and employed use their time in a given day using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) for 2008, which includes data from our current recession. The best part is the interactive graphic (shown below) that allows you to see what percentage of people in the given classification are doing each different activity each minute of the average day.

A great animated map on the employment situation, from Slate.

Thanks to Bart-man for the link.

As I wrapped up a chapter on labor markets today, a student asked what the labor market in China was like.  I couldn't give her precise numbers regarding the unemployment rate, so had to look back on some work that students of mine did last semester when they wrote about the macroeconomic experiences of different countries.  Here is a graph of the official rate of unemployment in China:

One of my former students sent me this CNN piece about Japanese corporations incentivizing fertility by making their employees go home early from work two days a week. I have a few comments and questions about this article that I'll put in writing below, and a lot more that I will leave to imagination.

I was pretty inactive here from mid December-early January.  During this time I was preparing for and attending the annual ASSA meetings, where many first-round interviews for economics PhDs are held.  

The following chart highlights my amazing ability to time the market.  The shaded areas represent NBER recessions, the first vertical red line is the date I graduated from college, the second is the date that I completed graduate school.