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Characteristics of the Long-Term Unemployed in March 2007 and March 2014 1 (October 7, 2014)

handle is hein.congrec/cbo1887 and id is 1 raw text is: Cong esst ®                   udgt
~OCTOBER 7, 2014
Characteristics of the Long-Term Unemployed in
March 2007 and March 2014
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has asked the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for
information about the characteristics of people who have been unemployed for a long time.
Specifically, she asked the agency to describe any changes in those characteristics that occurred
between March 2007 and March 2014. In answering that question, this document
supplements and updates information provided in CBO's Understanding and Responding to
Persistently High Unemployment (February 2012), www.cbo.gov/publication/42989.
The recent recession and slow recovery led to a high rate of long-term unemployment, which
is defined as being out of work for more than 26 consecutive weeks. That rate peaked at
4.3 percent in the second quarter of calendar year 2010 and has fallen considerably since then
(see Figure 1). It was 2.4 percent in March 2014 and has since fallen further to 1.9 percent in
the third quarter of 2014, still about a percentage point above its average from 2001 to 2007.
In both of the periods that CBO compared (March 2007 and March 2014), people
experiencing long-term unemployment were, relative to the overall labor force, more likely to
be male, to be young, to be unmarried, to be African American, and to have no postsecondary
education (see Table 1).1 However, the characteristics of the long-term unemployed changed
in some ways between the two periods. For example, among people unemployed for more
than half a year, some groups accounted for larger shares in 2014 than in 2007-particularly
women, people with a college or graduate degree, and people age 55 or older. Also, as typically
happens during and after a recession, people who lost a job involuntarily accounted for a
larger fraction of the long-term unemployed in 2014 than they did before the recession.
1. The data discussed here are drawn from the Census Bureau's March 2007 and March 2014
Current Population Survey.

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