As the unemployment rate has soared to a recent record 14.7%, the highest since the Depression era, the coronavirus crisis may result in one alarming trend: forcing thousands of Americans into early retirement.
The coronavirus is impacting labor markets in three ways. First, there have been significantly larger than anticipated job losses. Second, many laid off workers are not actively looking to find new jobs. Third, participation in the labor force has declined by seven percentage points, a fall that overshadows the three percentage point cumulative decline that occurred from 2008 to 2016, according to data from the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago.
