Exploratory Empirical Research on the Pathology of Secondary Labor Markets. Why Is the Unemployment Rate So High at Full Employment?; Prospects for Shifting the Phillips Curve Through Manpower Policy.

The collection of three documents offers a two-page summary of research conducted in 1970 and the two resulting papers. Most of the work involved the preparation and analysis of data from the Survey of Economic Opportunity. The first paper, Why is the Unemployment Rate So High at Full Employment? examines the nature of the unemployment that remains even when aggregate demand is strong. A basic theme is that the Keynesian dichotomy between frictional and involuntary unemployment is not a very useful way to look at the problem of unemployment at full employment. The main part of the paper is devoted to an empirical study of data on workers who were unemployed at some time in 1966. The implication of various alternative hypotheses about unemployment are tested. Other research results together with subsequent research are reported in the second paper, Prospects for Shifting the Phillips Curve through Manpower Policy. The paper examines a variety of alternative manpower policies and attempts to make a quantitative appraisal of their effects on the trade off between inflation and unemployment. The paper surveys criticaly existing and proposal federal programs of all three kinds and concludes that only a relatively small shift in the Phillips Curve could be achieved through programs that are politically feasible. (Author)