The Long-term Effects of the Great Recession for America’s Youth

${image_title}$

Released: September 2010

Authors:

Adam Looney • Policy Director, The Hamilton Project; Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution
Michael Greenstone • Director, The Hamilton Project; 3M Professor of Environmental Economics, MIT; Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution

Introduction

The August employment numbers reflect the slow pace of the economy’s journey toward recovery. Overall, the U.S. economy continued to shed jobs as employment fell by 54,000 last month. In the private sector, however, businesses added 67,000 jobs, continuing a trend of lukewarm growth that began eight months ago.

As we have done for the past few months, The Hamilton Project continues to explore the “job gap,” which measures the number of jobs the economy needs to create to return to pre-recession employment levels while also absorbing the 125,000 people who typically enter the labor force each month. In this month’s post, we also dig deeper into the employment numbers to see how the Great Recession has impacted different age groups.