Why are people out of work? Is it because there aren’t enough jobs, or because people aren’t qualified for the openings that exist? Democrats tend to favor the “not-enough-work” theory, while many Republicans lean more to the unqualified-worker hypothesis. Bloomberg Businessweek’s Matthew Phillips waded into the debate last month with a good piece called “The False Theory of the Growing Jobs Mismatch.”
Now, economic research published June 6 by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago [PDF] concludes that evidence for a skills mismatch is “limited.” Write senior economists Jason Faberman and Bhashkar Mazunder: “If there is a skills mismatch in the U.S. labor market,” it may be most significant for workers with “medium skills.”
