Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. Andre Gide

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Beveridge Curves for 4 U.S. Regions (JOLTS)

Regarding my earlier post, a few people have pointed out that the measure of job vacancies I employed was based on newspaper advertisements. To the extent that there has been a shift in advertising away from print to online media, the Beveridge curves I plotted earlier may be distorted.

Evidently, the conference board has some measure of online job advertisements, available (I think) for only since 2005 or so. My RA reports that they want $20K for the data. Uh...sure. I'll see what I can do about this.

But in the meantime, I provide plots of regional Beveridge curves using JOLTS data which, unfortunately, is available only for the past decade. I do this first the conventional way, plotting vacancies against unemployment. But because I am no fan of unemployment measures (half of the flow into employment comes from out of the labor force), I also plot the BC my preferred way; that is, with vacancies plotted against the employment ratio.





3 comments:

  1. David,

    OT again, but I've been nosing around for other things and I happened upon employment data from the U.S. census for the 1850 - 1990 period (every decade obviously). It's from Historical Statistics of the U.S. I can't send you a link because it is password protected, but if you have some interest, I can probably package up some data for you. Or probably you have access to this database somewhere.

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  2. Prof J: We probably have access to this data at the Fed. But what did you have in mind, exactly? I don't want to make work for you, but if you have found some interesting patterns and would like me to post something on it, I would be very happy to do so!

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  3. I'm thinking about George's Selgin's piece about unemployment across the recession of 1873 - 76 (?). It looks like agricultural employment grew from 1870 - 1880, but there's no intra-decade data. There's all kinds of census data available actually. It's good for general trends, but you wouldn't see any year-over-year stuff.

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