Narayana Kocherlakota, Columnist

The U.S. Job Recovery Is a Global Laggard

Prime-aged and college-educated people aren't doing as well as in other developed nations.

October 25, 2016 at 11:00 AM UTC

Narayana Kocherlakota is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of economics at the University of Rochester and was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 2009 to 2015.

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It’s often said that the U.S. has recovered more strongly from the last recession than most other developed nations. Data on jobs, though, suggest that’s not quite true.

One simple measure of labor market performance is the fraction of people in their prime working years (ages 25 to 54) who have a job. Focusing on this age group helps strip out the varying effects of aging populations and retirement trends in different countries.