Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/0088.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Three-And-A-Half Million U.S. Employees Have Been Mislaid: Or, An Explanation of Unemployment, 1934-1941

Author

Listed:
  • Michael R. Darby
Abstract
A major conceptual error in the standard BLS and Lebergott unemployment estimates for 1933-1943 is reported. Emergency workers (employees of federal contracyclical programs such as WPA) were counted as unemployed on a normal-jobs-to-be-created instead of job-seekers unemployment definition. For 1934-1941, the corrected unemployment levels are reduced by two to three-and-a half million people and the rates by 4 to 7 percentage points. The corrected data show strong movement toward the natural unemployment rate after 1933 and are very well explained by an anticipations-search model using annual full-time earnings.

Suggested Citation

  • Michael R. Darby, 1975. "Three-And-A-Half Million U.S. Employees Have Been Mislaid: Or, An Explanation of Unemployment, 1934-1941," NBER Working Papers 0088, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:0088
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w0088.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Mincer, Jacob, 1976. "Unemployment Effects of Minimum Wages," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 84(4), pages 87-104, August.
    2. Gordon, Robert J, 1969. "$45 Billion of U.S. Private Investment Has Been Mislaid," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 59(3), pages 221-238, June.
    3. Gerhard Bry, 1959. "The Average Workweek as an Economic Indicator," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number bry_59-1.
    4. Lucas, Robert E, Jr & Rapping, Leonard A, 1969. "Real Wages, Employment, and Inflation," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 77(5), pages 721-754, Sept./Oct.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Bernanke, Ben S, 1986. "Employment, Hours, and Earnings in the Depression: An Analysis of EightManufacturing Industries," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 76(1), pages 82-109, March.
    2. Jovanovic, Boyan, 2009. "Investment options and the business cycle," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 144(6), pages 2247-2265, November.
    3. Bruce E. Kaufman, 2009. "Promoting Labour Market Efficiency and Fairness through a Legal Minimum Wage: The Webbs and the Social Cost of Labour," British Journal of Industrial Relations, London School of Economics, vol. 47(2), pages 306-326, June.
    4. Holzer, Harry J., 2008. "Living Wage Laws: How Much Do (Can) They Matter?," IZA Discussion Papers 3781, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    5. Rosen, Sherwin, 1985. "Implicit Contracts: A Survey," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 23(3), pages 1144-1175, September.
    6. Samara Ahmed & Adil E. Rajput & Akila Sarirete & Asma Aljaberi & Ohoud Alghanem & Abrar Alsheraigi, 2020. "Studying Unemployment Effects on Mental Health: Social Media versus the Traditional Approach," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(19), pages 1-14, October.
    7. Daehaeng Kim & Chul-In Lee, 2007. "On-the-Job Human Capital Accumulation in a Real Business Cycle Model: Implications for Intertemporal Substitution Elasticity and Labor Hoarding," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 10(3), pages 494-518, July.
    8. Lemos Sara, 2005. "Political Variables as Instruments for the Minimum Wage," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 4(1), pages 1-31, December.
    9. Rene Cabral & Andre Varella Mollick & Joao Ricardo Faria, 2010. "Capital and Labour Mobility and their Impacts on Mexico's Regional Labour Markets," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 46(9), pages 1523-1542.
    10. Aurélien Goutsmedt, 2021. "From the Stagflation to the Great Inflation: Explaining the US economy of the 1970s," Revue d'économie politique, Dalloz, vol. 131(3), pages 557-582.
    11. Robert A. Margo, 1993. "Employment and Unemployment in the 1930s," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 7(2), pages 41-59, Spring.
    12. Casanova, Luis. & Jiménez, Maribel. & Jiménez, Mónica., 2015. "Calidad del empleo y cumplimiento del salario mínimo en Argentina," ILO Working Papers 994891263402676, International Labour Organization.
    13. Olivier Blanchard, 2000. "What Do We Know about Macroeconomics that Fisher and Wicksell Did Not?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 115(4), pages 1375-1409.
    14. Judd, Kenneth L, 1987. "The Welfare Cost of Factor Taxation in a Perfect-Foresight Model," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 95(4), pages 675-709, August.
    15. World Bank, 2005. "Labor Market Adjustment, Reform and Productivity in Colombia : What are the Factors that Matter? Volume 2 : Technical Report," World Bank Publications - Reports 8406, The World Bank Group.
    16. Andrei Markevich & Mark Harrison, 2006. "Quality, experience, and monopoly: the Soviet market for weapons under Stalin," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 59(1), pages 113-142, February.
    17. Dany Brouillette & Calista Cheung & Daniel Gao & Olivier Gervais, 2017. "The Impacts of Minimum Wage Increases on the Canadian Economy," Staff Analytical Notes 17-26, Bank of Canada.
    18. Bosch, Mariano & Manacorda, Marco, 2008. "Minimum wages and earnings inequality in urban Mexico. Revisiting the evidence," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 19561, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    19. Jinjing Li & Denisa Maria Sologon, 2014. "A Continuous Labour Supply Model in Microsimulation: A Life-Cycle Modelling Approach with Heterogeneity and Uncertainty Extension," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(11), pages 1-15, November.
    20. Rossana, Robert J., 1998. "On the adjustment matrix in error correction models," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(2), pages 427-444, July.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:0088. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.