劳动力市场分离的长期上升：来自本地劳动力市场的证据

N O V E M B E R2 0 2 4 Jaison R. Abel|Richard Deitz The Long-Term Rise of Labor Market Detachment: Evidence from LocalLabor MarketsJaison R. Abel and Richard Deitz Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports, no.1138November 2024https://doi.org/10.59576/sr.1138 Abstract We develop a measure of chronic joblessness among prime-agemen and women in the United States—termed thedetachment rate—that identifies those who have been out of the labor force for more than ayear. We show that the detachment rate more than doubled for men sincethe early 1980s and rose by aquarter forwomen since 2000, though it isconsistently considerably higher for women than men. Wethen explore theeconomic geography of labor market detachment to help explain its rise.Results showthat the detachment rate increased more in places with weaklocal economies, particularly those thatexperienced a loss of routineproduction and administrative support jobs due to globalization andtechnological change. The loss of production jobs affected both men andwomen and was particularlyconsequential in the 1990s and the first decadeof the 2000s, while the loss of administrative support jobsmostly affectedwomen and was particularly severe in the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, wefind the rise indetachment was concentrated among older prime-ageindividuals and those without a college degree, andoccurred less in placeswith high human capital. JEL classification:E24, J21, J24, J61, O33, R12, R23Keywords:joblessness,laborforceparticipation,locallabormarkets,jobpolarization,globalization,technologicalchange,regionaldivergence “These forces [globalization and technological advances] have, amongother things, eliminated large numbers of American manufacturing jobsover a number of decades, leaving many people—mostly men—unable tofind new ones.” --Council of Economic Advisors,June 2016 “The erosion of [executive assistant] jobs that gave women without collegedegrees a career path happened in dribs and drabs but is as dramatic asthe manufacturing decline.” --The Wall Street Journal,January 2020 I.INTRODUCTION Troublingly, a growing number of Americans in the prime of their working livesare not working and have become completely detached from the labor market. Indeed, laborforce participation has been declining since at least the late-1990s, even among prime-ageindividuals (Aaronson et al., 2014; Krueger, 2017; Abrahamand Kearney, 2020).Moreover, joblessness more broadly—including those unemployed as well as those out ofthe labor force—among prime-age men has increased threefold since the 1980s (Austin,Glaeser, and Summers, 2018). Being out of work, especially for long periods of time, canbe particularly damaging to workers’ prospects, potentially causing skills to atrophy,reducing connections to job networks, leading to a stigma that may be hard to shake, andotherwise making it more difficult to reenter the labor market. Moreover, high geographicconcentrations of joblessness can have negative consequences for communities, includinghigh levels of poverty and government support, family dissolution, and a general frayingof an area’s social fabric (Wilson, 1996; Autor, Dorn, Hanson, 2019). As such, chronicjoblessness warrants special attention, though it has received relatively little in theliterature. In this paper, we study a particular form of chronic joblessness among prime-agemen and women in the United States. We construct a measure of what we termlabormarket detachmentwhich captures those who have been absent from the labor force formore than a year. This concept has generally not been singled out in the literature andstudied as its own form of joblessness, which is important because it is not the same asbeing unemployed or out of the labor force in general, which mixes shorter stints with moreprolonged periods of not working. Significantly, we show that labor market detachmenthas been on the rise for prime-age men since at least 1980 and for prime-age women sincearound 2000. Indeed, the share of prime-age men who have been out of the labor force formore than a year more than doubled from 4 percent to 9 percent between 1980 and 2015,before declining modestly from then until the pandemic hit in early 2020, as labor marketconditions strengthened following the Great Recession. The share of prime-age women outof the labor force for more than a year is much higher than for prime-age men and fell from27 percent to 16 percent between 1980 and 2000 as women’s labor force participationincreased, before climbing from 16 percent to 22 percent between 2000 and 2015. Further,we find that the rise in detachment was driven by a growing proportion of prime-age menand women who report being ill or disabled and, to a lesser extent, early retirement,pointing to a lack of economic opportunity as a potential contributor. Indeed, while there is a cyclical component to labor market detachment, we argueits long-term rise is closely connected to persistent weakness in local econom