From a paper by Samuel Kapon and Joseph Tracy at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York:
As the economy recovered and growth resumed, the unemployment rate has fallen to 6.7 percent. …..The employment-population (E/P) ratio frequently is used as an additional labor market measure. The E/P ratio is defined as the number of employed divided by the size of the working-age, noninstitutionalized population. An advantage of the E/P ratio over the unemployment rate is that it is not impacted by discouraged workers who stop looking for employment.
Since the end of the recession, the E/P ratio has largely remained constant—that is, virtually none of the decline in the E/P ratio from the Great Recession has been recovered to date. An implication is that the 7.6 million jobs added since the trough of employment in February 2010 has essentially just kept pace with growth in the working-age population. In its failure to recover, the E/P ratio would seem to depict a much weaker labor market than indicated by the unemployment rate. An important question is whether this is a correct or a misleading characterization of the degree of the labor market recovery…….
Read more at A Mis-Leading Labor Market Indicator – Liberty Street Economics.
Hat tip to Barry Ritholz.
