Title: The demand for youth
First published: 2009
Description: "The employment and hours worked of young individuals fluctuate much more over the business cycle than those of prime-aged individuals.  Understanding the mechanism underlying this observation is key to explaining the volatility of aggregate hours over the cycle.  We argue that the joint behavior of age-specific hours and wages in the U.S.  data point to differences in the cyclical characteristics of labor demand.  To articulate this view, we consider a production technology displaying capital-experience complementarity.  We estimate the key parameters governing the degree of complementarity and show that the model can account for the behavior of age-specific hours and wages while generating a series of aggregate hours that is nearly as volatile as output"--Federal Reserve Board web site.
LC classification: HG3879