1 Chart That Shows The Long-Term Unemployed Crisis

Rand Ghayad, who received his PhD at Northeastern University and is now with The Brattle Group, is one of the leading experts on long-term unemployment.

He's perhaps best known for widely discussed research that revealed — through the submissions of thousands of fictious resumes — how even qualified long-term unemployed job seekers are often passed over by employers.

Ghayad delivered a presentation at a recent conference at MIT on long-term unemployment, and one Beveridge Curve chart from his slide deck stood out to me. I've asked his permission to use it, and for an explanation of what it shows. His emailed response and the chart:

The one of the left shows that people out of work for less than six months haven't had a harder time finding work than they usually do. When job openings increased after the end of the recession, the unemployment rate for those who have been out of work for six months or less decreased in the same way we normally expect it to behave.

The chart on the right shows us the unhappy case. When firms started posting new jobs after the end of the recession, the unemployment rate among those out of work for more than six months did not decrease. This suggests that the long-term unemployed were not benefiting from the increase in vacancies.

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