Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
7348969 Economics Letters 2018 5 Pages PDF
Abstract
The unemployment rate is one of the most important economic indices. This article extends the work of Feng and Hu (2013) and examines the effects of potential misclassifications in labor force statuses on the different Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) unemployment measures. Compared to the official US unemployment rate U-3, the broader measure U-6 is more robust to such classification errors in the survey data that are used to calculate unemployment rates. If one prefers the definitions of U-3, then we offer an approach to use reported unemployment measures to proxy for the unobserved true U-3.
Related Topics
Social Sciences and Humanities Economics, Econometrics and Finance Economics and Econometrics
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