The Recent Decline in Labor Force Participation and its Implications for Potential Labor Supply
Bibliographic record
Abstract
to George Perry, Dan Sichel, and especially Joyce Zickler for helpful comments. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Reserve Board or other members of its staff. The labor force participation rate is defined as the percentage of the working-age population reporting themselves as either working or actively looking for work. This statistic, which is constructed from data collected as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS) and is published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), is arguably the most prominent measure of the supply of workers to the U.S. economy. For much of the past four decades, the participation rate has trended up, rising from less than 60 percent in the early 1960s to more than 67 percent by the late 1990s. However, after having peaked at 67.3 percent in the first quarter of 2000, the labor force participation rate fell steadily to under 66 percent by early 2005 and has edged up only to just above 66 percent since then. As shown in figure 1, such a decline in labor force participation is nearly unprecedented in the post-war economic experience. Although the upward trend in
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.031 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".