The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels

James J. Heckman and Paul A. LaFontaine: Geary WP/28/2008. The authors establish that:

(a) the true high school graduation rate is substantially lower than widely used measures;
(b) the U.S. graduation rate peaked in the early 1970s;
(c) majority/minority differentials are substantial and have not converged over the past 35 years;
(d) lower post-1970 rates are not solely due to increasing immigrant and minority populations;
(e) their findings explain part of the slowdown in college attendance and the rise in college wage premiums;
(f) growing high school graduation differentials by gender help explain increasing male-female college attendance gaps.

Visualisation of the Live Register Gender Gap in Ireland

Here is a visualistion of the gender gap in the Live Register (right up to May '09), courtesy of Status Ireland. Males are shown as the blue line, coming onto the register at a much faster pace than females since last summer.

The Man-Cession and U.S. Unemployment

Gerard O'Neill mentioned the idea of the "man-cession" recently. Brendan Walsh has documented the Irish case and shows that "female participation in the Irish labour market held up well in 2008, but male unemployment has risen, and participation fallen, faster".

A recent post from the Economist Blog notes the 2.5% difference between the male unemployment rate (10.5%) and female unemployment (8%) in the U.S. during May (the BLS figures came out last Friday). This is the highest male-female jobless rate gap in the history of BLS data back to 1948. Overall, the U.S. unemployment rate climbed to 9.4 percent on Friday, its highest point in a quarter-century. On the Economix blog, Catherine Rampell compares job losses in recent U.S. recessions as a share of employment.

However, some commentators suggest that Friday's jobs report qualifies as good news. According to David Leonhardt on the Economix blog, the unemployment rate is "known as a lagging indicator, because it continues to worsen for months even after the economy starts to improve. A better indicator is the monthly change in overall employment, and it suggests the worst job losses of the Great Recession may now be over". However, he also cautions that "the economy remains in very bad shape. A broader measure of job-market distress than the unemployment rate — one that counts, among others, part-time workers who want to be working full time — shows a rate of 16.4 percent." More on broad measures of job-market distress is available here.

Finally, it is also worth noting that 21 percent of those who are unemployed have been out of work for at least 15 weeks. That figure exceeds the 19.6 percent proportion in this category that was last seen during the 1958 recession. According to Floyd Norris on his NYT blog, the long-term unemployment rate shows that there is still a major problem in finding employment for people. Returning to the theme of the "man-cession", Catherine Rampell commented recently that women are now surpassing men in degrees attained in every major category in U.S. higher education: associate, bachelor’s, master’s, professional and doctorate. This may go some way to explaining why more women are holding on to their jobs in the U.S.

Men Behaving Badly

I felt suitably chastened after reading this. Illustrative quote includes: "In a fascinating and innovative study, Coates and Herbert (2008) advance the notion that steroid feedback loops may help explain why male bankers behave irrationally when caught up in bubbles." Someone send me a paper if I am wrong but I do not see compelling evidence yet that companies with more women at the top (controlling properly for other aspects of the work environment) behaved more cautiously during the last financial boom period. The final paragraph in the article seems more intuitive to me, namely the short-run assymetric nature of incentives distorted financial behaviour. Once again though, very difficult to test in the wild particularly as companies may adopt such structures in response to other companies adopting them.

http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3572

Coates, J. M. and J. Herbert, “Endogenous Steroids and Financial Risk Taking on a London Trading Floor,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, 2008, 6167-6172.