Prime-Age Men May Never Return to U.S. Workforce, Fed Paper Says
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Men in their prime working years have left the labor force at an astonishing rate and they may never return if the state of the U.S. job market holds, according to a new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
A decline in demand for middle-skilled work -- a phenomenon dubbed “job polarization,” because more positions are concentrated at the higher and lower ends -- has played a role in keeping prime-age men out of the job market, Didem Tuzemen, an economist at the Kansas City Fed, wrote in the paper released this week. Without job polarization, Tuzemen estimated that 1.9 million more prime-age men would have been employed in 2016.