VW, UAW

While I prepare a post on Mitsubishi Motors (I began going through financial statements a couple weeks back) let me point to a post by Jared Bernstein on ironies with the labor movement today. His contention is that we see pro-business, government-shouldn't-constrain us conservatives trying to constrain the ability of VW to invite in the union. Consistency is apparently for small minds. Behind the Veil

Two Further LF Graphs

While I continue to work on a blog post on Mitsubishi Motors, let me put up two further graphs on employment by age bracket, broken into (i) older workers and (ii) younger workers with January 2007 as a base. (I won't post details, but using a different base does not change things.)

First, since the share of older workers in each age bracket rises, the drop in LF participation is not due to a larger share of workers taking early retirement. Indeed, the data show just the opposite, that older workers are more likely to stay in the labor force than before the recession. (This is not a recent shift. Age breakdowns are available starting in 1994; older worker participation was rising by the late 1990s, but without a longer time series, I can't preclude that change having started earlier. Nor can I get a breakdown by gender on the BLS web site, though the BLS can likely generate those numbers.) Oh, and for a nice analysis of survey data on why people were not in the labor force, see Ellyn Terry's post on the Atlanta Fed macroblog, "What Accounts for the Decrease in the Labor Force Participation Rate?"

(un) Employment

The latest Current Population Survey (and Current Employment Survey) data show a labor market that barely grew, once you account for demographics. Earlier posts (most recently Auto Recovery, yes ... but as for the rest) provide snapshots of employment and employment corrected for involuntary short hours, both relative to an employment-propensity weighted population projection. Here's another cut, shifts in age-specific ratios of employment to population. That helps correct for

Hotelling redrawn: party dilemmas in a primary system

In August I posted an Economic Model of Elections. The new academic term began today, and the class following mine was preparing to look at a version of that model as their intro topic. Then a colleague stopped in and we chatted about the same thing. As a result I redid my graphs. First, the basic Hotelling model (dating to 1929), or to political scientists the median voter model, predicts centrist politics in a single member, one vote per person electoral system. All vote for the candidate closest to them in political stance. Candidates who try to stake a position away from the center get trounced, as their opponent will move closer to their position and pick up more than half the vote.

In the US national elections come after party primaries. While there are splinter parties, there are only two main parties, as seems to be the case in all (mature) single member district systems (Duverger's Law).