Maximiliano Dvorkin is a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. His research focuses on labor reallocation and the effect of different economic forces on workers’ employment and occupational decisions. He joined the St. Louis Fed in 2014. Read more about the author and his work.
Between mid-March and the end of April, U.S. unemployment rolls rose quickly to 33 million, while the unemployment rate jumped to almost 15%.
The growing presence of robots may affect U.S. demand for routine manual jobs like assembly work.
Most job growth comes from startups and other new firms. But few of these firms survive long enough to have a lasting impact on job creation.
See why jobs in the District, nation are increasingly becoming high-skill or low-skill. The decline of middle-skill jobs may be widening income inequality.
As in the nation, the Eighth Federal Reserve District’s main trading partners are Canada, Mexico, China and the European Union. What is imported and exported, however, can vary significantly.
The Eighth District added about 150,000 jobs from 2010 to 2013, almost 75 percent of them in low-paying industries. Such jobs are growing at a faster rate than those in high-paying industries, the opposite of what is happening on the national level.
Income inequality has increased in the St. Louis Fed's District over the past 30 years, although at a slower pace than in the nation as a whole. In both areas, the inequality is increasing primarily between the top-income earners and the middle-income earners.
A question often on people’s minds is whether the unemployment rate is capturing all the relevant information on the health of the labor market these days. Are any of the other standard indicators any better? What do indexes that measure labor market conditions tell us?
