What Are The Ages For Unemployment?

How does unemployment vary over the life cycle? Teenagers generally have the highest unemployment rate of any demographic group, and nonwhite teenagers in recent years have experienced unemployment rates between 30 and 50 percent. Is this unemployment frictional, structural and cyclical?

Recent evidence indicates that, particularly for whites, teenage unemployment has a large frictional component. Teenagers move in and out of the labor force very frequently. They get jobs quickly and change jobs often. The average duration of teenage unemployment is only half that of adult unemployment; by contrast, the average length of a typical job is 12 times greater for adults than teenagers. In most years, half the unemployed teenagers are new entrants who have never had a paying job before.

All these factors suggest that teenage unemployment is largely frictional, that is it represents the job search and turnover necessary for young people to discover their personal skills and to learn what working is all about.     But teenagers do eventually learn the skills and worker habits of experienced workers. The acquisitions of experience and training along with a great desire and need for full time work, is the reason middle edged workers have much lower unemployment rates than teenagers.