WASHINGTON (AP) — A new study documents the bleak plight of Americans who have been unemployed for more than six months: Just 11 percent of them, on average, will ever regain steady full-time work. 
 
 The findings by three Princeton University economists show the extent to which the long-term unemployed have been shunted to the sidelines of the U.S. economy since the Great Recession. The long-term jobless number 3.8 million, or 37 percent of all unemployed Americans. 
 
 "The long-term unemployed are more than twice as likely" to stop looking for a job than to find one, according to the paper co-written by Alan Krueger, formerly President Barack Obama's chief economic adviser. "And when they exit the labor force, the long-term unemployed tend to say they no longer want a job." 
 
 During any given month from 2008 to 2012, barely more than one in 10 of the long-term unemployed had found full-time work. Their troubles were similar in states with high as well as low unemployment rates. 
 
 The analysis shows that a better predictor of hiring comes from the short-term unemployed, who are far more likely to be rehired. 
 
 Across the country, levels of short-term unemployment have essentially returned to pre-recession averages, even though the overall national unemployment rate remains historically high at 6.7 percent. The paper says that based on the number of short-term unemployed, further job gains could lead to "rising inflation and stronger real wage growth." 
 
 That's because the relative exclusion of the long-term unemployed means that employers must choose from among a limited supply of workers. That trend could push up prices. 
 
 Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen on Wednesday cited flat wages and low inflation running below the Fed's 2 percent target as evidence that the Fed should continue to support the recovery by keeping interest rates extremely low. 
 
 The number of people unemployed for more than six months has tripled since the recession began at the end of 2007. It peaked at 6.77 million in early 2010 and has declined to a still-high level as more unemployed workers have ended their job hunts and are no longer counted as unemployed. 
 
 The share of Americans who are either working or looking for work has fallen to a 35-year low. Some long-term unemployed have reached retirement age. Others have obtained federal disability benefits. Many have survived through side jobs and help from relatives and friends. 
 
 There's also the possibility that a substantial share of the long-term unemployed will continue to stop looking for work because the federal government's emergency benefits program for them expired at the end of 2013. 
 
 Up to 2 million Americans who would have benefited from the emergency benefits program have lost that assistance, according to the National Employment Law Project. One of the requirements for receiving benefits was that a recipient look for a job. With the loss of benefits, many have likely ceased their job searches and are no longer counted as unemployed. ||||| Princeton University professor Alan Krueger dives deep into the problem of long-term unemployment in a new paper to be presented Thursday at the Brookings Institution. He calls people who have been out of a job for six months or more an “unlucky subset of the unemployed” who exist on the margins of the economy -- with faint hope of returning to productivity. Here are five takeaways from his paper, co-authored with Judd Cramer and David Cho of Princeton. 
 
 1. Long-term unemployment has little impact on inflation 
 
 One of the many questions arising from the Great Recession that has perplexed economists is why inflation has not fallen even farther than it has. Conventional economic theory calls for a decline averaging one percentage point a year between 2009 and 2013, when the unemployment rate averaged 8.7 percent. Instead, inflation declined by an average of just 0.2 percent points. 
 
 What happened? Krueger’s paper builds on previous work suggesting the reason is because many of the unemployed have been out of work so long that they no longer exert much pressure on wages, and hence, inflation. Instead, it’s the short-term unemployment rate that correlates most closely to changes in pay and prices. 
 
 2. The long-term unemployed have a hard time not only finding a job, but also keeping one. 
 
 The paper uses data from the Current Population Survey to track what happens to the long-term unemployed over 16 months. It found only about a quarter of people were hired within a few months of the survey. Of those, about 35 percent were unemployed once again or left the labor force within a year. 
 
 Overall, only about 11 percent of the long-term unemployed were in steady, full-time work after 16 months. 
 
 “It appears that reemployment does not fully reset the clock for the long-term unemployed,” the paper states. 
 
 3. Long-term unemployed who leave the labor force are unlikely to come back 
 
 Roughly one in 10 of the long-term jobless left the workforce altogether within a few months of the survey, and most of them stayed out of the labor market after a year. The paper notes that the most common reason for leaving is that they no longer wanted a job, suggesting the decision is permanent. 
 
 4. The long-term unemployed stay in their field 
 
 Krueger analyzes the short-term and long-term jobless who were rehired in 2012 and the industries in which they found work -- and finds they look very similar to the industries they left. For example, about 27 percent of the long-term unemployed who found jobs that year previously held blue-collar positions. Conversely, about 26 percent of the hires in blue-collar jobs that year were long-term unemployed. 
 
 Here’s another way to look at this: There is no sign that long-term unemployed will make a big career switch. Despite lots of discussion about retraining workers for jobs in fast-growing industries such as health care, they tend to find employment in the fields they know best. 
 
 5. A stronger economy doesn’t hurt -- but it doesn’t help much, either 
 
 The paper hones in on how the long-term unemployed have fared in the 13 states with the lowest jobless rates as of last fall: Hawaii, Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and Wyoming. The average unemployment rate among those states was 4.3 percent, compared to the national rate of 7 percent. 
 
 Yet even the states with strong labor markets suffered a sharp rise in long-term unemployment that peaked at 4.5 times their historical average. That’s close to the quintupling of long-term joblessness seen in high-unemployment states. The difference in the probability of finding a job since the recession is only slightly better in strong markets than in weak markets. 
 
 “Overall, there is little evidence in this comparison to suggest that the long-term unemployed fare substantially better in the states with the lowest unemployment rates, consistent with the idea that the long-term unemployed are on the margins of the labor force, even where the economy is stronger.” 
 
 So now what? 
 
 The stubbornly high rate of long-term unemployment is one reason some officials at the Federal Reserve have cited for keeping interest rates near zero. Some have even argued that the Fed should keep rates low even after the unemployment rate has returned to more acceptable levels in hopes of drawing people who have left the labor force back into the fore. But Krueger’s paper seems to suggest that there is little more the Fed can do to help those workers -- and that it risks stoking inflation if short-term unemployment falls too far in the process. 
 
 In the paper, Krueger deftly dodges those issues, befitting someone who until last year was the chief economist at the White House. He merely points to the need for a “broad array of policies” to tackle the problem of long-term unemployment. The responsibility, he suggests, falls on all of us:
– The situation is even bleaker than it might seem for the 3.8 million Americans classed as long-term unemployed, a new study finds. Only 11% of the long-term unemployed in any given month had found work a year later, according to research from three Princeton University economists, and they are far more likely to drop out of the workforce permanently than to return to full-time employment, the Los Angeles Times reports. The outlook for the long-term unemployed has failed to improve despite short-term unemployment levels returning to pre-recession averages, the AP finds. The researchers, including Alan Krueger, President Obama's former chief economic adviser, also found that even among the long-term unemployed who found jobs, more than a third ended up jobless within a year, the Washington Post notes. The researchers called for aggressive measures to fix the job market, including "designing effective interventions to prevent the long-term unemployed from receding into the margins of the labor market or withdrawing from the labor force altogether," reports the Wall Street Journal.