Tag Archives: Unemployment

from Lars Syll The NAIRU story has always had a very clear policy implication — attempts to promote full employment are doomed to fail since governments and central banks can’t push unemployment below the critical NAIRU threshold without causing harmful runaway inflation. Although a lot of mainstream economists and politicians have a touching faith in the NAIRU fairy tale, it doesn’t hold water when scrutinized. One of the main problems with NAIRU is that it is essentially a timeless...

Eurostat published new data on employment in Europe. Average employment growth is +0,9%. The average hides stark differences. A Germany-centered core consisting of Germany, Austria, Sweden, Estonia, Finland, and Hungary shows declines. Surprisingly, it excludes Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. The South does better. Countries like Portugal, France, Greece, and, especially, Spain post above-average increases. But unemployment in these countries is still high (over 5%), even when EU...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]I’ve just released Chapter 9 of my open access textbook. This chapter focuses on youth homelessness. A ‘top 10’ overview of the chapter can be found here: https://nickfalvo.ca/youth-homelessness/

I’ve just published Chapter 8 of my open access textbook. This new chapter focuses on women’s homelessness. An English summary of the new chapter can be found here: https://nickfalvo.ca/womens-homelessness/ A French summary of the new chapter is here: https://nickfalvo.ca/litinerance-chez-les-femmes/ All material related to the textbook can be found here: https://nickfalvo.ca/book/

There was a problem during the 7th Godley-Tobin Lecture. I disconnected everyone when I was trying to fix a problem with Professor Stirati's presentation, and I didn't notice until much later. The worst part is that the recording was lost. I'm posting here the PowerPoint presentation for those interested. We will also post the link for the published version of the lecture, which will be open also on the website of the Review of Keynesian Economics (ROKE).

A bit behind here as other things have distracted me in AZ. Health being one of them. A double dose of excellent reviews of the economy today. If there is one commentary (if you are rushed) on Angry Bear you should read concerning the economy, it is NDd’s reporting. Spending and Unemployment are in the early commentary today. Not sure what NDd has in store for later. The economy and employment are in far better shape after the pandemic than what...

Initial jobless claims confirm benign employment conditions  – by New Deal democrat Initial claims declined -14,000 to 209,000 last week, and the four week moving average declined -750 to 220,000. With the usual one week lag, continuing claims declined -22,000 to 1.840 million: On a YoY basis, both weekly claims and their four week average were up only 4.6%. Continuing claims, which have been much more elevated YoY, were up 24.0%:...

Consumption leads (longer term) unemployment, too  – by New Deal democrat Once again there is no new economic data, so let me follow up some more on the issue of longer term unemployment. Earlier this week I pointed out that just as initial claims lead continuing claims, so does short term unemployment (under 5 weeks) lead long term unemployment (15 weeks and over). Think of unemployment as a pipeline, and the intake flows before the main...

Scenes from the August employment report – and a warning  – by New Deal democrat The weekly lull after last Friday’s employment report will end tomorrow. In the meantime, let’s take a deeper dive into a few important trends in that report. First, the unemployment rate rose 0.3% to 3.8% – which is totally not surprising at all. As I wrote last Thursday, initial jobless claims have a nearly flawless 60+ year record for forecasting the trend...

Inflation is coming down, as the last BLS report shows. I'm not going to get into that into this (very short) post. The disinflation has taken place while the official unemployment remains very low. However, we all know that unemployment measures very poorly the situation in the labor market. My alternative measure, which I make students calculate in macro classes, is what would be the unemployment rate be if the participation rate, which has been declining since the early 2000s (when China...