FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF NEW YORK Current Issues IN ECONOMICS AND FINANCE www.newyorkfed.org/rmaghome/curr_iss Has Structural Change Contributed to a Jobless Recovery?

The current recovery has seen steady growth in output but no corresponding rise in employment. A look at layoff trends and industry job gains and losses in 2001-03 suggests that structural change—the permanent relocation of workers from some industries to others—may help explain the stalled growth in jobs. Asurge in payroll jobs used to be a reliable sign of the end of a recession—but not any longer. When the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the accepted arbiter of business cycle dating, recently designated November 2001 as the end of the nation’s latest recession, it based its decision largely on the growth of output (GDP). 1 By the end of June 2003, GDP had risen 4.5 percent from its low in the third quarter of 2001 and significantly exceeded its pre-recession peak. While the members of the Bureau’s dating committee saw the strong growth of this indicator as persuasive evidence that the downturn was over, they acknowledged that their decision was made very difficult by the “divergent behavior of employment. ” What troubled the committee was that payroll employment, which would normally rise in tandem with output, had shown no sign of recovery. Indeed, the payroll numbers fell almost 0.4 percent in 2002 and another 0.3 percent through July 2003. In this edition of Current Issues, we explore why the recovery from the most recent recession has brought no growth in jobs. We advance the hypothesis that structural changes—permanent shifts in the distribution of workers throughout the economy—have contributed significantly to the sluggishness in the job market. We find evidence of structural change in two features of the 2001 recession: the predominance of permanent job losses over temporary layoffs and the relocation of jobs from one industry to another. The data suggest that most of the jobs added during the recovery have been new positions in different firms and industries, not rehires. In our view, this shift to new jobs largely explains why the payroll numbers have been so slow to rise: Creating jobs takes longer than recalling workers to their old positions and is riskier in the current uncertain environment.

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