Recession hits young people particularly hard, knocking them off course for years to come
Peter Orszag
Issue date: 11/18/09 Section: Opinion
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All of us are keenly aware of the immediate struggles we face because of the current economic downturn. I'm sure many of your families are facing excruciating choices that, even a few years ago, would have been unimaginable.
But what may be less appreciated is the long-term impact of this crisis-on our economy, on our fiscal situation and on our future.
So, as we move from rescuing the economy to rebuilding it, it's essential that we keep these long-term effects in mind-because only by addressing them can we succeed in building a new foundation for stable economic growth.
A new body of social science literature demonstrates that an economic downturn has a long-term impact on workers and their families. Consider the effect of what economists call an "exogenous labor shock"-but normal people call a "lay-off"-on the life course not of those laid off ... but on their children.
A range of studies have found that having a parent experience unemployment is significantly associated with whether you graduate from high school, whether you go to college, whether you get a job after college, and how much you get paid in that job. And the effect is persistent-with higher high school dropout rates and lower college enrollment rates evident even years later.
Reflecting this, the children of workers who were once laid off have lower average wages as adults-even decades later than those whose parents never experienced such setbacks.
And even if you or your parent didn't experience a layoff, the long-term repercussions of a recession are evident.
In other words, the impact extends to those not directly affected by unemployment-by those entering the workforce for the first time ... the rising generation of workers. The adverse effect of entering the labor force during an economic downturn imposes a drag on career earnings that goes far beyond the duration of the recession itself.
One recent study, for example, found that graduating during a period of high unemployment leads to depressed initial wages-roughly 6 percent on average for every 1 percentage point increase in unemployment. This negative wage effect declines only slowly over time: to 5 percent after five years, 4 percent after 10 years, and 3 percent even 15 years after graduation.
Remember, that's for each percentage point increase in the unemployment rate. When most of today's seniors entered NYU, the unemployment rate was about 5 percentage points lower than it is today.
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