Matt Yglesias directed me to a graph showing that teenage employment has bounced back to near pre-Covid levels:
This surprised me, as prime-age employment remains depressed at levels well below early 2020:
What explains the difference? There are many potential explanations, but one possibility is that teenagers are less likely to be receiving generous unemployment benefits, as many of them were not working when the Covid recession hit last March, or had not worked long enough to qualify. What are some other theories?
If I’m right, then prime age employment should bounce back after the extra $300/week benefits expire in early September.
PS. It’s true that in an absolute sense the teenage employment ratio is quite low, but it was also low in 2019 when the economy was booming and jobs were plentiful. Today, teenagers are less likely to choose to work than back in the 20th century, when teen participation rates were higher. Many teens now participate in extensive extracurricular activities to boost their chances of getting into a good college. (I worked in a canning factory when I was 17.)
READER COMMENTS
Steve Waldman
Apr 20 2021 at 10:45pm
Another theory might simply be that teenagers are at lower risk from COVID than prime age cohorts, so that’s another discouragement they experience less.
Scott Sumner
Apr 21 2021 at 12:00pm
Good point.
Scott Sumner
Apr 21 2021 at 12:10pm
I will say that the drop in employment for people age 55-64 is no worse than for 25-54 year olds, even though people 55-64 face a risk that is more than 10 times greater.
Dale Doback
Apr 20 2021 at 11:28pm
Alternate theory: extracurricular activities were largely cancelled and online or hybrid schooling has given teens significantly more free time than they’ve had in the past.
Scott Sumner
Apr 21 2021 at 12:00pm
Good point.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Apr 21 2021 at 6:42am
College admissions officers should take employment into account in their decisions, not only in the sense of signaling need but as experience. The applicant should be able to argue that canning factory experience is as valuable as Lacrosse practice.
Of course this will not eliminate gaming of admissions, just change the game. My recollection of the opportunity to work during high school was that it was a function of “connectedness” and my employment in high school was due to my father’s friendship with the owner of a local business firm. I’m not sure I was the very best employee he could have found or that my MP> wage.
Still as an indicator of academic success, it’s worth something and might lead to some increase in socio-economic diversity of those admitted.
Matthias
Apr 24 2021 at 9:58pm
I think you the effect of making connections less important, by just removing the judgement from admission officers, and concentrating on grades or some independently administered test of ability.
Andre
Apr 21 2021 at 7:28am
First, the differences don’t seem that stark to me. Eyeballing the graphs, it looks like a 1% gap remaining for the young and a 4% gap for the 25-54s – a difference, yes, but that’s magnified by the scale of the graphs. Yes, I know that at scale we’re talking about hundreds of thousands to a few million people, but the country has a third of a billion.
Second, the young are at virtually no risk so positions favor them. And work needs to be done.
Third, lots of adults are getting paid to stay home.
People respond to incentives.
Question: Is teens filing for unemployment much of a thing?
Daniel
Apr 21 2021 at 9:05am
Good point Andre: Graphs overlapping, indexed
However, if you zoom out to ’08 and re-index, you can also see teenage employment didn’t have the bounce back it did in 2020. The situations were a liiittle different I’d say, but it’s good to be looking for explanations of what happened, including differential risks and financial disincentives.
Scott Sumner
Apr 21 2021 at 12:05pm
Actually, that difference is huge, and highly significant in a statistical sense. We are talking about roughly 5 million jobs.
Jon Murphy
Apr 21 2021 at 9:34am
It may also be that the jobs generally available during the pandemic (ie “essential”) were ones largely staffed by teens and young people to begin with. Food service, delivery, etc.
Scott Sumner
Apr 21 2021 at 12:03pm
Possible, but I suspect that essential jobs are actually less likely to be done by teens.
Fenn
Apr 22 2021 at 9:03am
That’s not the relevant statistic. The point was that teens are highly likely to be in essential jobs. Which is overwhelmingly true. Teens make up a negligible portion of all industries except for wholesale/retail trade and leisure/hospitality (being the largest age cohort in restaurants).
Among all essential jobs, you might be right that the median age is higher, because that would include industries like healthcare where teens are poorly represented. But the teen employment category itself is extremely concentrated in two industries that have remained open during the pandemic, and especially in sectors of those industries that have seen massive booms.
Groceries and supercenters that employ lots of teens have received a massive boom during the pandemic. Within restaurants, the pandemic has had a very differential effect, with low-cost fast food and chains with delivery/curbside pickup, that employ a lot of teens, experiencing a huge boom while more established sit-down restaurants that employ older and more experienced staff dropping off. Similarly in the rest of the leisure/hospitality category, employment has been way down everywhere but in teen-heavy fast food. Indeed, the unemployment effects of the pandemic have largely been a story about tourism and travel-driven leisure/hospitality.
This whole conversation, however, only bolsters the point about unemployment benefits: it offers a mechanism for why unemployment benefits may stifle employment recovery. Those in tourism and travel-driven leisure/hospitality sectors probably feel they are better off staying on generous unemployment benefits until their tourism-driven jobs return. Whereas a teen who used to work at Disneyland maybe now has gone and found a job at Zaxby’s.
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