Jobs

Our research focus in this domain is on the historic and future labor market supply and labor market demand for education, with secondary interest in occupation and industrial clusters at the national and sub-national levels.

Key questions:

• How does our understanding of trends in education demand change when we move from the current time-invariant fixed coefficient measure used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to a method that incorporates additional historic information about the underlying labor market dynamics?
• How has the recession affected differential job loss by industry, and what is the impact of this recession on long-run employment figures?
• How will the stimulus affect job creation in the short-run, and what are the education and training requirements for stimulus jobs?
• How do estimates of education demand change when we move away from truncating the education distribution within occupations when projecting labor market dynamics?
• How do we incorporate knowledge of the population growth rates, labor force participation by education level, and the flow of degrees and credentials, to estimate the supply stock of education by occupation?
• How do these same methodological changes affect understanding of changing labor markets and educational demand and supply at the state and sub-state levels?

Once these key questions are addressed, we will use the results to tackle additional questions, including:

• What impact will the retirement of the baby boom generation, returning military veterans, and increasing globalization have on future education demand and supply and on labor markets?
• What are the likely short-run occupational and industry skill shortages that might arise by geographic area?